Commonwealth v. Duncan

In Commonwealth v. Duncan, 572 Pa. 438, 817 A.2d 455 (2003), the court held that a warrantless telephone call made by police to the appellant's bank, seeking the name and address associated with an ATM card used by a person suspected of a crime, did not violate the individual's constitutional right to privacy. In Duncan, our Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to privacy does not extend to one's home address. It is worth quoting from Duncan at length: We agree with the Commonwealth that any subjective expectation of privacy that appellant may have had in the name and address information is not an expectation which society would be willing to recognize as objectively reasonable in light of the realities of our modern age. Whether registering to vote, applying for a driver's license, applying for a job, opening a bank account, paying taxes, etc., it is all but impossible to live in our current society without repeated disclosures of one's name and address, both privately and publicly. There is nothing nefarious in such disclosures. An individual's name and address, by themselves, reveal nothing about one's personal, private affairs. Names and addresses are generally available in telephone directories, property rolls, voter rolls, and other publications open to public inspection. In addition, it has become increasingly common for both the government and private companies to share or sell name and address information to unaffiliated third parties. . . . In this day and age where people routinely disclose their names and addresses to all manner of public and private entities, this information often appears in government records, telephone directories and numerous other documents that are readily accessible to the public, and where customer lists are regularly sold to marketing firms and other businesses, an individual cannot reasonably expect that his identity and home address will remain secret - especially where, as here, he takes no specific action to have his information treated differently and more privately. We are further convinced of the correctness of our conclusion that no privacy expectation reposes in this information by the fact that the majority of courts to consider the question have agreed that a person's name and address is not information about which a person can have a reasonable expectation of privacy...Id. at 455-56, 817 A.2d at 465-66.