EFF asked the California Supreme Court not to weaken the Stored Communications Act, a 1986 federal law that restricts how providers can disclose the content of your communications to the government or private parties.

The law is built on the principle that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy that providers like Snap and Meta will not disclose your communications to third parties, even though the providers have access to those communications as they are stored on their systems. In an amicus brief, we urged the court to uphold these privacy protections, as they have for the past 40 years. EFF filed the brief along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Mozilla Corporation.

A lower court decision got it wrong. And we are urging the California Supreme Court to overrule that decision. If the lower court's ruling is affirmed, Meta, Snap, and other providers would be permitted to voluntarily disclose the content of their users' communications to any other corporation, the government, or any individual for any reason.

We previously helped successfully urge the California Supreme Court to hear this case.