In 1986, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was two years old and the World Wide Web hadn’t yet made surfing the Internet as easy as typing in an address. What we now know as the Internet existed mainly as a service for researchers, academics and businesses, and it would be four years before commercial service providers began offering Internet access directly to consumers.
The same year, Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which brought Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures to the realm of electronic information. The law, Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, prohibits disclosures of “stored wire and electronic communications and transactional records” by third party Internet service providers (ISPs).
