In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s detailed cellphone location history from a tech company, even when the data covers only a short period.
How the Ruling Changed Digital Privacy
The Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s interest in the privacy of their location data. As a result, even when the data covers only a brief period or is held by a third-party company, it remains protected by the Fourth Amendment. Under the ruling, because obtaining the data counts as a search, police generally must secure a warrant supported by probable cause and describing the scope of the search with sufficient particularity before accessing it.
Why the Fourth Amendment Applies
The Court has made clear that this kind of location data is constitutionally protected and cannot be treated as freely available to law enforcement as it may have been in the past. While this case involved Google and Android phones, the ruling’s protection of detailed cellphone location histories is not company-specific and could extend to comparable records held by Apple and other technology companies in the future.
What Happens to Geofence Warrants
The Court did not, however, decide whether the geofence warrant used in Chatrie’s case was valid. Instead, it sent the case back to the appeals court to determine whether each stage of the warrant was supported by probable cause and sufficiently particularized. It is worth noting that the ruling does not ban geofence warrants.
Ongoing Legal Challenges
In 2019, Virginia police used a geofence warrant to obtain Google location data from Android phones near the scene of a robbery, ultimately leading investigators to a suspect. Initially, Google provided anonymized location data for 19 devices, which investigators narrowed to 9 and ultimately to 3 identified users. That, in turn, led investigators to Okello Chatrie, who was later indicted by a federal grand jury on robbery and firearms charges. Chatrie moved to suppress the Google location data, arguing that police had obtained it through an unconstitutional search. The district court agreed that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence under the good-faith exception. Chatrie’s legal challenge then made its way to the Supreme Court.
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