Mosaic theory

Fourth Amendment
Under the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment, courts evaluate a collective sequence of government activity as an aggregated whole to consider whether the sequence amounts to a search. Under the theory, searches are "analyzed as a collective sequence of steps rather than as individual steps."

Overview
"The approach is based on the observation that comprehensive aggregation of even seemingly innocuous data reveals greater insight than consideration of each piece of information in isolation. Over time, discrete units of surveillance data can be processed to create a mo- saic of habits, relationships, and much more. Consequently, a Fourth Amendment analysis that focuses only on the government’s collection of discrete units of data fails to appreciate the true harm of long-term surveillance &mdash; the composite."