Suppose you get pulled over because your left taillight is burned out, your license plate is a little out of date, or one of your passengers threw a cigarette butt out the window. And suppose the officer notices that you have a cell phone in your pocket. Should I be able, without a warrant, to look at you like looking at the photos in your wallet while you pull out your driver’s license?

One of these same things happened to David Riley, in California. His tags were expired and he was detained. In addition, it was discovered that he was driving with an expired license and the police impounded his vehicle. A search of the car turned up weapons and his cell phone, which was seized and searched like a wallet in a pocket.

A modern wallet (even one made from duct tape) has the capacity to store about the same amount of data as a wallet of yesteryear: driver’s license, ID card, a few credit cards, a few family photos, a couple of phone numbers on the corners of the napkins and some cash.

But a modern wallet-sized smartphone, even if 8-year-olds can use it to play Angry Birds or watch SpongeBob SquarePants, is an engineering marvel, with more computing power than the supercomputers that were at the top . the line not long ago. When Huey Lewis was singing “The Power of Love,” the most powerful supercomputers of the day would have surpassed today’s iPhone. A smartphone is not just a wallet, as it can store documents equivalent to 100,000 wallets.

The California Attorney General said a phone in a pocket is no different than a wallet or a photo in a pocket, even though trucks would be needed to transport such paper data. Hence the case of Riley v. California, which resulted in a conviction on another charge (a gang shooting), based on evidence on Riley’s smartphone. Riley argues that the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” should have protected him from having all the data on his cell phone seized and examined. The US Supreme Court will hear and presumably decide this case at the federal level in the coming months.

We have recently discovered, thanks in part to sources like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, that we already live in an age of pervasive spying, listening, and watching. Should we then allow our “papers and effects” stored on our mobile devices to be seized and searched for the static data they contain? To decide, perhaps we should take a look at what these devices contain and what a forensic examiner can see on them.

Let’s start with the obvious: pictures and phone books. I’m not a complete pack rat, but my iPhone has around 5,000 photos. It also has a couple hundred phone numbers, complete with names, street addresses, email addresses, and more. And that’s just my immediate family!

A quick look at my apps and I see over 200. Many of those apps store data on my phone, including texts, messages, more pictures, there’s a lot of stuff. Data stored by apps on my device includes dates, times, durations of events and activities. It stores who I had and will have meetings with, and when and where. A forensic examiner can see where I’ve been on the web, what I’ve searched for, what I’ve looked at, and for how long.

Then there are less obvious facts. The phone stores the names of the networks and wi-fi signals that I have connected to and when. The images store GPS data so we can see when and where I took a photo, down to a few meters away and fractions of a second in time. So we can see not only where I’ve been on the Web, but also where I’ve been in the world.

Notes: Pages and pages and pages of notes that you seem to have collected. Perhaps hundreds. Voice notes: mine go back 5 years. What’s in all of those? I don’t even remember. But I really don’t want to throw them away unless I know what I’m throwing away.

Then there’s an interesting item that can’t even be accessed through an app, but forensic examiners love it. It’s a dictionary file, not from Webster, but one designed by [your-name-here]. It is a kind of informal keylogger. It keeps track of the items you type and helps its autocorrect find the occasional crazy spelling because you’ve typed it that way before. It can have thousands of words, and several hundred of them are almost in sentence form, just as you wrote them. You may have typed them in any app, even one that doesn’t store documents, messages, or emails on your phone. You might be surprised at what’s in there.

So you decide: do you want all this information to be public? Do you want to get pulled over for an expired license plate and have to hand over your phone and all this information to an ambitious and curious police officer who thinks there might be something of dubious legal interest in there? Does he believe that there is nothing on his device that anyone would think is indicative of a violation of the law? Or vow breaking?

That is the issue the Supreme Court will address this summer. SCOTUS will be telling us what the law of the land will be, and if the Gigabytes of your private life could become public. Single. I like it. That.

What is your position on the subject?

TO UPDATE: Less than ten minutes after I published this article, the Supreme Court decision was announced on June 25, 2014 (much faster than the author expected). He found out from Riley and for privacy, that police must have a warrant if they want to search an arrestee’s cell phone or other digital device. Said Chief Justice Roberts: “Our answer to the question of what police should do before searching a seized cell phone as an incident of an arrest is simple: get a warrant.”

Steve Burgess, 2014