18 U.S.C. § 2702, part of the Stored Communications Act, is one of those laws that you rely on every day but you have probably never heard of before. The law blocks Internet communications and storage providers from disclosing the contents of your online accounts. Think about the really private stuff you store online, like your emails, photos, text messages, and other communications. Section 2702 is basically the Internet's privacy wall for all of those stored contents. Unless an explicit exception to the statute applies, such as the government coming with a warrant, your provider is not allowed to share your private account contents with others.
Or so everyone has thought.
On July 23, 2024, the California Court of Appeal handed down a surprising ruling in Snap, Inc. v. Superior Court (Pina), holding that the SCA does not apply to most remotely-stored online messages. The court interpreted the law's privacy bar to not apply if providers have a right of access to customer data for their own business purposes. In the court's view, the § 2702 disclosure bar can only apply if the companies have no right of access to user accounts beyond the access required for providing storage and processing. The court then applied that standard to the contents at issue in the case—a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and a Snapchat account—to hold that § 2702(a) does not bar their disclosure.
