Login | July 18, 2025
High Court rejects man’s appeal that app use protected by Fourth Amendment
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: July 18, 2025
The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled that a Columbus man indicted on aggravated robbery and related charges had no reasonable expectation of privacy while using a third-party online-marketplace app in the lead up to committing the offense.
Justices affirmed the Tenth District Court of Appeals’ reversal of the trial court ruling that allowed 25-year-old Mamadou Diaw to suppress information Columbus police had acquired by issuing a subpoena to the app Letgo on the basis that the information was acquired in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“Start with voluntariness. There is little difficulty concluding that Letgo users voluntarily provide their location information to a third party. Users make the affirmative choice to download Letgo. They also make the choice to create a Letgo account,” Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy wrote for the 7-0 court. “Having voluntarily conveyed his location to Letgo in the ordinary course of using the app, Diaw cannot now assert a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.”
According to case background, Diaw, using the alias John Malick, listed a laptop for sale on Letgo in February 2020.
A male individual, who is not named in the summary, agreed to buy the laptop from Malick, whom police later identified as Diaw, and showed up Feb. 18, 2020, at the agreed meeting location––the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant near Diaw’s residence.
After getting into Diaw’s car, Diaw stole the man’s phone and money he had brought to buy the laptop, took the laptop away from the man and began punching him in the head and face, while an accomplice in the car pointed a gun at the man, summary detailed.
Diaw followed the victim as he exited the car, pushing him to the ground and repeatedly kicking him, causing injury to the man’s ribs.
Employing R.C. 2935.23, which allows law enforcement to subpoena witnesses after the commission of a felony but before any arrest has been made, Columbus Police Detective Michael Sturgill subpoenaed Letgo for all names, addresses, phone numbers, I.P. addresses and email addresses associated with the customer using the name of John Malick and posting for sale the laptop in Columbus between Feb. 16 and 18, 2020, summary continued.
Letgo provided the detective with an IP address, an email address associated with the posting and a single latitude and longitude point––the McDonald’s restaurant located on East Broad Street, adjacent to Diaw’s apartment.
A Franklin County grand jury subsequently indicted Diaw, who moved to suppress the information police obtained from Letgo.
The trial court granted the motion, and a Tenth District appellate panel reversed the lower court ruling.
The appellate panel held that Diaw did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his location data, because police obtained only a single, voluntarily communicated data point that was historical in nature and was not a real-time location or Diaw’s home. Diaw appealed to the Supreme Court.
“In this case, police subpoenaed three days’ worth of information but received location data for only a single day,” Kennedy continued. “Using Letgo falls squarely within the third-party doctrine: Users voluntarily choose to use Letgo. And the data that Letgo provided to law enforcement revealed the location where the user had logged in to use the app but did not reveal any information that the Fourth Amendment protects.”
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