A resident sits on a bench in a city park, joins the free Wi-Fi, and taps “Accept” on a splash page without reading it. Months later, a detective asks the city for the connection records from that access point. Does that tap mean anything when the question is privacy?
Courts have only begun to answer that question, and neither of the two decisions discussed below directly addresses a municipal public Wi-Fi network. But they point in different directions, and together they show why the terms of use on a public network deserve more thought than they usually get.
What Dunkins tells us
Commonwealth v. Dunkins, decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in November 2021, arose from a dorm robbery at Moravian College. Campus police asked the college’s IT department to identify which students had been logged onto the campus Wi-Fi near the dorm at the time, using general network connection information from one of the college’s wireless access points. The college’s computing policy said that “logging in to or otherwise connecting to the campus network implies acceptance” and that users “cannot and should not have any expectation of privacy” in their data. The student had accepted that policy, and the court concluded he “abandoned any purported expectation of privacy in the WiFi connection records.” It reached that result without deciding whether Carpenter v. United States applies to Wi-Fi records, relying on the principle that courts should avoid constitutional questions when a case can be decided on other grounds.
What Chatrie adds
Chatrie v. United States, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2026, held that “police officers invade a cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy when they access his Location History.” The Court noted that Location History draws on “nearby Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth beacons, and cell sites, as well as GPS and IP address information.” The issue there was Google’s Location History, not logs held by a city or its Wi-Fi provider.
The government argued that turning on Location History is a voluntary choice. The Court rejected that argument, saying it “ignores some pertinent facts about how and why Google users turn on Location History.” Google’s prompts, the Court observed, did not tell users how often their location would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government. A cell-phone user, the Court said, “is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties” merely by using a phone in ordinary ways.
Why the question stays open for cities
Chatrie involved a commercial location service and a warrant, not a city network, and Dunkins involved a college with a detailed policy and enrolled students. A city that offers free Wi-Fi to anyone near a library or a main street is in a different position: the terms may be short, the user may be a visitor, and the network belongs to a government. Neither decision addresses that situation, and this article does not predict how a court would. What the two cases share is a point worth noticing: what a user was told, and what the user could understand from it, mattered.
What good terms can and can’t do
Terms can tell people the truth. Plain-language terms can say what the network collects, how long it keeps it, and how it responds to law-enforcement and public-records requests. What they should not do is promise more than the city can deliver: a statement that the city never shares data is hard to keep if the law requires a response. A city should treat its terms as a clear disclosure, not as a shield, and settle its underlying practices before it writes them.
Where this lands in a BEAD project
Municipal teams working through these questions can find a useful frame in how the Anaptyx CivicConnect™ Team describes its work. Created by Kenneth Carnesi, Sr., COO of Anaptyx MSP, the team is dedicated to municipal BEAD projects and to managing BEAD project public Wi-Fi networks, and it organizes the work in four stages: plan, respond, deploy and operate. The last stage, monitoring, supporting, maintaining and reporting on a network built for public use in places such as libraries, community centers, main streets, parks and transit, is where terms of use, logs and requests stop being theory and become daily matters.
On the partnership side, I found Carnesi’s guide, BEAD: Unlocking the Future, instructive. It covers funding allocation, deployment strategies and long-term goals, and it looks at how small IT vendors, MSPs and ISPs can partner with municipalities. Those partnerships are where questions like these get settled: who operates the network, who holds the logs, and who answers a request. They are easier to settle before the first user connects.
Questions to review with counsel
- What does the network log, and does a sign-in portal collect names, emails or phone numbers?
- How long are records kept, including copies held by a managed provider?
- Who receives law-enforcement and public-records requests, and who reviews them?
- Do the terms describe what actually happens, and nothing the city cannot promise?
- Does the provider agreement say what the provider may release, and when it must tell the city?
Kenneth Carnesi, Sr. is COO of Anaptyx MSP and founder of the Anaptyx CivicConnect™ dedicated BEAD Program team. He is the author of BEAD: Unlocking the Future and The Bill of Rights at A Crossroads.
