Coinbase (Coin) filed a brief summary in a US Supreme Court lawsuit in 2019, including the Internal Revenue Service’s request for data on hundreds of thousands of customers, arguing that the court should “protect Americans’ privacy interests over digital information stored by third-party service providers.”
The US tax agency was seeking financial records under the attitude that, in President Donald Trump’s first administered lawsuit, it should be made available for personal transaction records if they share personal transaction records with third parties. In this example, the party was Coinbase. The exchange fought to narrow down its demands through court battles, and was ultimately forced to provide a much narrower range of data.
“The court must step in to make it clear that third party doctrines do not allow the IRS to do dragnet searches,” Coinbase argued on Amicus Brief on Wednesday in a case that has broad privacy implications.
In 2020, one of its clients, Bitcoin (BTC) researcher James Harper filed a lawsuit against the IRS, accusing them of inappropriate over-earning of records demands. A few years later, Harper, a lawyer and fellow and American Enterprise Institute, has his argument in the High Court.
“User anonymity disappears — and blockchains are susceptible to simple surveillance when governments obtain information that aligns public keys or wallet addresses with users’ identity,” Coinbase said.
“This John Do has invaded an area where more than 14,000 Americans have reasonable expectations of privacy for unguaranteed IRS trolls on broader personal and financial information,” the company alleged.
On behalf of the government’s case, the Justice Department previously argued that “there is a lack of reasonable expectations for the privacy of information voluntarily provided to third parties, including bank records related to him.”
Read more: How lawsuits against the IRS attempt to expand crypto users’ privacy
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