According to a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals this week, tech companies like Facebook can collect data from users and provide it to the government without violating their Fourth Amendment rights.

The case originated when Facebook and Yahoo collected information via account searches that was later used to convict a defendant of child exploitation. However, these searches weren’t conducted on the government’s orders.

“[Tech companies] are free to go pretty far in searching your data and not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment because they’re not state actors,” Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, told Bloomberg Law. “Even if they verge close to working closely with the government in terms of turning information over, there’s few limits to that.”

However, a critic of the ruling noted that Facebook was basically acting as a government agent in this case, and that “this ruling puts online privacy at risk for all of us.” So while it seems that Facebook was able to thread the needle here and remain on the right side of the law, there’s still thre potential for this case to play a part in additional legal proceedings in the future.

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