The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that police need a judge's authorization to access Canadians' Internet protocol addresses, saying that such digital identifiers carry an expectation of individual privacy. The Globe's Colin Freeze writes that in a narrow 5-4 ruling on Friday, the court said that on-line activity logged by corporations needs to be better protected from warrantless searches. Law-enforcement bodies had argued that such data is not private and that courts are already too congested with warrant application work. IP addresses are the digital-device equivalent of mailing-address information. Computers use this routing information to send data to other computers, and phones and routers. The ruling highlights how tech companies are increasingly gathering and trading data about Internet traffic. "Third-party companies, such as Alphabet's Google or Meta's Facebook, can track the external IP addresses of each user who visits their site and log this information to varying degrees. These companies can determine the identity of those individual users based on their Internet activity on their sites," Justice Andromache Karakatsanis wrote for the majority.