The Fourth Amendment of the United State Constitution, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, does not protect users on the PlayStation Network from warrantless searches conducted by network proprietor Sony, a district court judge ruled this week.

The case involved a PSN user going by the handle Susan_14. The account, owned by the defendant in the case Michael Stratton, was reported to Sony on several occasions for soliciting child pornography through spam messages.

Sony reviewed the account—without providing notice or acquiring a warrant—after receiving complaints and found the account had been used to download and upload several pornographic images involving children.

Sony reported the findings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then coordinated with the FBI to gather additional information about Stratton, including his email address (“nudesusan14@gmail.com”) and IP address acquired through subpoenas from Google and internet provider CenturyLink.

The information was enough for a judge to issue a warrant for law enforcement to search Stratton’s home in Kansas, where they discovered child pornography stored on his PlayStation 3. The finding lead to his arrest.

Stratton’s defense attempted to argue he had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for the information he stored on his PSN account, and Sony didn’t have the right to share his information—including the child porn housed on Sony’s servers—without a subpoena or warrant.

The court was unmoved by the argument, finding the terms of service for PSN explicitly state that users give Sony the right to “monitor and record your and your Sub Account's activities and communications.” The terms also note that Sony may disclose any user information to “appropriate authorities or agencies.”

The defense also tried to make the case Sony was acting as a government agent when it searched the Suan_14 account—an approach that fell flat because, in the court’s viewing, Sony was monitoring the account for its own benefit and reported what it found and wasn’t required to perform the search by any government agency.

Alan Butler, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told International Business Times the ruling “falls under what is commonly referred to as the ‘private search’ doctrine.”

The finding that, as Butler described it, “Sony’s review of that data was an action of a private entity, not compelled by any government agency,” falls in line with other cases of companies sharing private information that is in violation of federal law.

In a paper from Priscilla Grantham Adams, senior research counsel for the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, on the private search doctrine, she describes the policy as “extinguish[ing] an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the object searched.” Once the search has occurred, she explains, “the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit governmental use of this non-private information.”

While the finding doesn’t present a picture all that different than previous rulings—it simply extends the concept of the private search doctrine to more tightly controlled Sony’s PlayStation Network—Butler noted any attempt to extend the court’s opinion beyond the case it was ruling one is “dicta and was beyond the scope of what the court was asked to decide in that case.”

Butler said the court’s conclusions about the privacy interests that apply to electronic communications sent via PSN and similar networks is “inconsistent with the prevailing standard in federal courts and the standard recognized by the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies.”

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