The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment.
Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug your neighbor's apartment.
It has not been normal until the last few years for people to typically have an Alexa-like device that is always listening for the "I'm about to make a request" signal, which frequently gets turned on by accident.
It's not ridiculous that someone might conclude in the future, "if you're in someone's house with such a device, you should reasonably expect that some part of your conversation might get sent to the third party", which would mean a diminishing of the right to such privacy in 4th amendment jurisprudence.
And frankly, the whole concept of using voice to activate it is reckless. It is unavoidable to have significant false positives. It should be done with a non-audio signal that can't be faked (up to the limits of modern crypto), like an authenticated EM signal to turn on the listening.
Google Now: 2012 Siri: 2010 Microphones in cell phones: longer than those two.
It hasn't only been a few years.
In any case, 4 years vs 10 years doesn't matter. The point is, a court hasn't addressed it in the context of changing norms, at which point I claim there is a danger that it will re-evaluate what counts as private, just as OP was.
Google Now never was, to my knowledge, though I could be wrong.
From the court's opinion (the above [1]):
>> ... obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the home's interior that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search--at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use.
>> Based on this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.
>> the imaging in this case was an unlawful search
That's why face recognition bans and other privacy protection laws ("personally identifiable information") are so welcome.
Now as to whether they could find anything to charge you with that would stick that would depend on if the state had any sort of peeping tom laws, and if the police went up to the house and found if anyone was naked or partially naked in the house while the thermal camera was being used.
That said if there was a peeping tom law, and there was a naked person, the party with the camera that was charged could then argue that thermal cameras don't show enough to be considered under the law.
However it is my experience that police can be creative when they want to charge someone when that someone is doing something they don't like, so not sure that just a peeping tom law would be brought into play on such a circumstance.
I suppose after all this you might argue that police overreach does not make it actually illegal, but in general my viewpoint is that something being illegal is determined by power and in the case under discussion the court wanted what the police did not to be illegal because they felt it benefited the power of the system that it be so, and therefore shaped their arguments to their wants, not to any particular logic or moral sense. Thus when later another court wants the people on the street using the tech to be illegal, power gets what it wants.
As you imply, none of this prevents the police from arresting you and taking you downtown anyway. They can even say they thought it violated peeping tom laws (Heien vs. North Carolina). Beyond that, "you can beat the charge but you can't beat the ride" is an old truism among abusive police.
Kyllo is almost 20 years old, so the likelihood of a city having a law contravening it is probably low (IANAL).
I think you're wrong that they generally require the peeper to be looking while on private property because if that were the case the peeper would be trespassing and could be charged with that, although certainly it may be the case in some places. State by state basis makes it difficult to say for sure.
I guess it might be beneficial to have peeping tom laws limited to what one does on private property with the understanding that rich people have big enough property that you have to get on it to reasonably violate their privacy. Thus you can construct the law to protect the privacy of rich and poor alike as long as they have 5+ acre estates. And it is true that is is nice to have multiple things you can charge someone with, so they can plea bargain some of them away. So that they can be charged with trespassing still doesn't mean that they wouldn't want a law to charge them with peeping as well.
But as I understand it the reasonable expectation of privacy generally applies to stuff like your home, or a private dressing room (if talking about actors) and so forth.
Thus if someone is having a shower in the upper bathroom and you have climbed up a high tree off their property to look through an open window that they would not expect anyone to climb because wtf, then you are probably a peeping tom and violating a peeping tom law if it exists in that state.
You... not. But the police? Issue a warrant and they don't even have to risk, as in the decades before, having a spy physically break in to the building or the target discovering the bug.
Secret services (CIA/NSA) probably even have their direct uplink to Amazon or at least under-the-tables cooperations established to snoop on foreign people "for antiterror reasons" (aka helping out allied services, just like with the BND and MI5 with snooping on global Internet traffic).