The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 today that geofence warrants — the practice of sweeping up smartphone location data of everyone near a crime scene — constitute a Fourth Amendment search, requiring probable cause and particularized suspicion. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion in Chatrie v. US, holding that individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their cell phone location records, even when those records are held by a third party like Google.
Why “You Chose to Share” Is Dead as a Legal Argument
The government argued that because Chatrie voluntarily opted into Google’s “location history” feature — a feature Google repeatedly prompts users to enable, warning devices “will not work correctly” otherwise — the data wasn’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. Kagan called that characterization “meritless.” The majority pointed out that people don’t forfeit privacy just by doing what any smartphone user does: use apps and services that depend on location data to function. More than 500 million Google users had location history enabled — that’s roughly one-third of active Google account holders. The court effectively said “opt-in” doesn’t mean “consent to government surveillance.”
Sotomayor’s Unflinching Catalog of Sensitive Places
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s concurrence reminded everyone why this matters: “Even short-term monitoring” reveals “a wealth of detail about [a person’s] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” She listed trips to “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the Aids treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, [or] the by-the-hour motel.” That’s not rhetorical flourish — it’s a direct challenge to the government’s claim that location data is too crude to reveal intimate details. Law professor Matthew Tokson of the University of Utah summed up the fear: “If the government doesn’t need to … link something to a crime, it could monitor a protest or an abortion clinic or a gun range or a church or an AA meeting or a doctor’s office.”
What This Means for Police and Google
Police have used geofence warrants as a first resort when leads run dry. The FBI and local departments would ask Google for location data of every device inside a virtual fence during a specific timeframe, often sweeping in thousands of innocent users — a fact Google itself acknowledged in court filings. In the Chatrie case, Richmond police tracked an armed bank robber who stole $195,000; he pleaded guilty and got 12 years. But the court didn’t rule on whether that particular search was reasonable — it kicked that question back to the appeals court. The new line is clear: a geofence warrant triggers Fourth Amendment protection at the outset. Law enforcement must now show particularized probable cause for each step of the warrant, not just a general dragnet. This ruling forces police to trade convenience for constitutionality.
The 2018 Precedent That Made This Possible
This decision extends the logic of Carpenter v. United States (2018), where the court held that the government needs a warrant to access cell-site location records spanning seven days. Chatrie now covers the shorter, more granular sweeps that geofence warrants demand. The government had tried to distinguish Carpenter by arguing geofence warrants grab less data (often an hour or two), but the majority brushed that aside: the quantity of data doesn’t matter when the method is a warrantless treasure hunt.
Expect law enforcement to push for legislative workarounds, but for now, the constitutional floor just got higher. The next time police want to know who walked past a bank at 2:00 PM, they’ll need a judge to sign off on something that looks a lot more like a traditional warrant — and a lot less like a panning for digital gold.
Source: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
Domain: theguardian.com
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