The 4th Amendment states in part: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures ….no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause …and particularly describing the place to be searched." In today's world, there are two common devices that people use on an everyday basis which have extremely personal information about an individual that the police should as a matter of course, not be allowed to search except under the most stringent conditions as well as under strict controls, and those would be our personal computer and our cell phone, but in fact, the police are eager, overeager to search both, which presents to them a wealth of very personal information about an individual, of which, the vast majority of that information is not germane to the case at hand. This information is so personal and the viewing of such so invasive, that it is fair to say, having gathered all of such data from a given person's cell phone is somewhat akin to vacuuming information directly from a given person's brain. That is why, if there is not specific legislation passed which restricts and monitors carefully such activity by our policing arm, the present situation will go from bad to worse.
The most important thing to get across, is that cell phones are essentially for many people, a detailed diary of their activities on a very specific minute-by-minute basis, of which, such information, should never be allowed to be freely accessed by the police, because, by definition, the searching of such information, is a massive net, scooping up literally everything, which includes all sorts of reams of data, which are not specific to any probable cause, and not distinct to an alleged crime that the police would have, it is, instead a great opportunity for the police to go on a personal fishing expedition, which then will create the potential to find a probable cause to fit a crime, ex post facto. So too, such information, can easily be stored, classified, and mined, so as to be available to the policing force, information that will allow the police to open up investigations or to do additional research for future crimes or for their own data collection interests.
A cell phone in the hands of the police, without any oversight by a strong independent party on behalf of the people, is a huge disservice to the people. That is to say, perhaps a reasonable accommodation for a search of a cell phone can be created, in which, first the police get a warrant issued upon probable cause and signed by a judge, that specifically lists the information that they desire to search for on that specific cell phone, and rather than the police doing such a search, that search could be done instead by a third party, in strict conformance with the search warrant instructions, so that only such information that specifically fits within that warrant is presented to the police, and all other information, is never provided, never saved, and never reviewed by the policing authorities.
If, on the other hand, the police are allowed to search a cell phone without oversight and without constraints, implicitly or not, or undetected or not, than the country will essentially create two worlds, one in which, those that collect and access information can permanently know everything about you, but you, will know nothing about them.