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On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear a case posing the question of how far your privacy rights travel along with the text messages you send from your phone.

Do the police need a legal basis to search your phone, so long as the only texts they read are the ones that you’ve received from others? Or can the police search for those messages without any reason at all, on the assumption that after someone hits the “send” button, any expectation of privacy in the message disappears?

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Last year, in R v. Marakah, the case now pending before the Supreme Court, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that your privacy rights in a text message vanish after you send it. By a two-to-one margin, the court held that the sender has a constitutionally protected interest in writing and sending a text message, but not in the message itself – so long as the police obtain it by searching the recipient’s phone.

If that decision is affirmed, it would allow the police to search anyone’s phone without having to give a reason, if they only look at the messages that came from other senders. In 2015, the British Columbia Court of Appeal divided the other way on this question, ruling by a two-to-one margin that everyone has a privacy right that continues even after the message has been sent.