The right to privacy is the right to avoid unwelcome inspection or invasion of one's person, one's lawful activities, and one's lawfully held property and effects. A search can only be contrary to privacy when it exposes or invades, or threatens to expose or invade, one of these things.

The listening device obviously threatens to invade lawful private conversation. The infrared camera invades all three categories. But the dog outside the car threatens none of them.

An appeal to the principle of privacy or any other principle can only be valid if somewhere, somehow, something legitimate is threatened. Since nothing legitimate was in any way threatened in this case, then clearly the court was correct in endorsing the search.

If you wished to argue that the problem is that the precedent poses a wider threat, I saw no hint of that. You did not assert that drug dogs are unreliable and might harass people about the marigolds they're carrying home from the store. You also did not assert that the searching dogs' proximity to future drivers would be reasonable cause for fear of unlawful harm. The only such assertion I find in your article is that the driver had a right to conceal the contents of his trunk, and that can only be true if, had his trunk held only legitimate contents, they would still have been invaded or threatened.

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