The US Supreme Court refuses to hear a cryptocurrency user data privacy case

According to Decrypt, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the Harper v. Faulkender case on Monday, which could have re examined whether cryptocurrency exchanges must provide customer data to the government. This decision has caused setbacks for cryptocurrency companies such as Coinbase, who had hoped that the court could create privacy exceptions for blockchain data similar to phone records. This case involves the 'third-party principle', which has long allowed the government to obtain customer records from service providers such as banks. The case involves James Harper, a Coinbase client whose personal transaction data was obtained by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during a large-scale investigation. In this investigation, the IRS requested information on over 14000 cryptocurrency accounts.