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Individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the connections between their personal information and the IP address they use to access the Internet, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Monday.

While the court’s ruling was based on the New Jersey constitution’s expanded definition of privacy, it is “an open question” as to whether the same privacy rights would be upheld in federal court, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University Law School, in a telephone interview.

The case concerns an employee accused of changing content on her company’s Web site and altering the password so no one else could correct the misinformation. On Aug. 27, 2004, Timothy Wilson, owner of Jersey Diesel, noticed his company’s shipping address had been changed on its Web site.

Deficient Subpoena

The company’s IT specialist reported that someone had logged onto the server, changed the address and changed the login password. The specialist found the IP address of the person who made the changes.

Wilson suspected an employee, Shirley Reid, with whom he had recently argued, and reported her as a likely suspect to the Lower Township, N.J., police. When Wilson contacted Comcast to request the identity of the IP address user, Comcast declined without a subpoena.

The local police then obtained a deficient subpoena from the municipal court and served it on Comcast, which complied, identifying Reid as the person who changed the site. The subpoena was captioned Wilson v Reid, although no such case existed — a blatant violation of the process.

Broad Protections

The question for the Supreme Court was whether the evidence gathered from the deficient subpoena should be suppressed. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has found no privacy expectation in Internet subscriber information, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the state’s constitution goes further and New Jersey citizens do have a…