Coinbase (COIN) filed a brief in the US Supreme Court case involving a request for internal revenue service for hundreds of thousands of its customers back in 2017, arguing that the court should “protect Americans’ privacy interests in digital information stored by third -party providers.”
The US Tax Agency – in an action during the first administration of President Donald Trump – had sought financial items in accordance with the attitude that the individual’s transaction registers should be made available once they had shared their information with a third party. In this case, this party was coinbase. The exchange struggled to narrow the request through the judicial struggles and was eventually forced to deliver a much narrower extent of data.
“The court should intervene to clarify that the third-party doctrine does not allow the IRS to implement Dragnet searches,” Coinbase claimed in his Amicus brief, which was filed on Wednesday in the case that has major consequences for privacy.
By 2020, one of the customers, James Harper, filed a Bitcoin (BTC) researcher, a lawsuit against the IRS that accused it for wrong overreach in his demand for items. Years later, Harper – a lawyer and fellow and American Enterprise Institute – has his argument for High Court.
“User anonymity disappears – and blockchain becomes susceptible to easy monitoring – when the government gets information that allows it to match a public key or wallet address to a user’s identity,” Coinbase noted.
“This John Doe convenes a sphere in which over 14,000 Americans had a reasonable expectation of privacy against a guarantee IRS trawl for extensive personal and financial information,” the company argued.
The Department of Justice, who represented the government’s case, had previously argued that “a person lacks a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that is voluntarily delivered to a third party, including bank registries relating to him.”
Read more: How a lawsuit against the IRS is trying to expand the privacy of crypto trucks
