In This Article:
Coinbase is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review outdated laws about privacy because it argues that users shouldn't lose their Fourth Amendment protections for information they provide to exchanges relating to their cryptocurrency activity.
As per Decrypt, Coinbase is requesting the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the appeal in Harper v. O'Donnell, an important case that could reshape the way digital privacy statutes are viewed in a crypto world.
While Coinbase is not an official party to the case, it did join X, a number of U.S. states, and digital privacy advocates in filing an amicus brief arguing against the "third-party doctrine," which has been a fixture in law since the mid-1970s.
The third-party doctrine states that when individuals share information with third parties—banks being the most common example, and in this case, crypto platforms—they give up their rights to privacy. Coinbase stated that such an approach made no sense in the digital age.
Their brief stated, “Users don’t surrender their right to privacy simply by storing information with a third party.”
Evidently, Coinbase has been through this process before. In 2016, the IRS issued a John Doe summons to Coinbase—an investigative order for information on over 14,000 unidentified users who were suspected of failing to report crypto gains. In 2021, Kraken and Circle both received John Doe summonses as well.
Coinbase argues that the issue is simply the transparency of blockchain networks and that the “exposure of a person’s identity on the blockchain opens a potentially wide window into that person’s financial activity,” allowing those who are curious to track users’ past and future transactions.