California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Valdivia, 16 Cal.App.5th 1130, 225 Cal.Rptr.3d 181 (Cal. App. 2017):
"To further complicate the scope of the privacy interests at stake, the data a user views on many modern cell phones may not in fact be stored on the device itself. Treating a cell phone as a container whose contents may be searched incident to an arrest is a bit strained as an initial matter. [Citation.] But the analogy crumbles entirely when a cell phone is used to access data located elsewhere, at the tap of a screen. That is what cell phones, with increasing frequency, are designed to do by taking advantage of cloud computing. Cloud computing is the capacity of Internet-connected devices to display data stored on remote servers rather than on the device itself. Cell phone users often may not know whether particular information is stored on the device or in the cloud, and it generally makes little difference. [Citation.] Moreover, the same type of data may be stored locally on the device for one user and in the cloud for another." ( Riley v. California , supra , U.S. , 134 S.Ct. at p. 2491, 189 L.Ed.2d at pp. 446-449, fn. omitted.)
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