This essay attempts to illustrate a historical approach to the concept “reasonable expectation of privacy” in American criminal procedure and likewise to illustrate the difficulties of adaptation to civil law systems that have privacy as a fundamental constitutional right. In this regard, the author shows the evolution of jurisprudential discussions in USA, starting with the Katz vs. USA court ruling of the sixties to modern interpretations that extend the model to the aerial surveillance of objects and people. Faced with the Colombian legislation is important to note that the concept has other interesting perspectives that have put the problem into a new reality of the law of evidence that relates to the control technology in criminal trials.