Police can no longer draw a digital fishing net over a map to scoop up everyone who happened to be near a crime scene. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Chatrie v. United States shuts down the most intrusive surveillance tactic short of a warrantless wiretap: geofence warrants that forced Google, Microsoft, Uber, and Yahoo to hand over location histories of thousands of innocent people.
The Case That Broke the Pattern
Okello Chatrie was convicted of bank robbery using location data obtained through a geofence warrant. His lawyers argued that prosecutors used a “search first, develop suspicions later” warrant – a reverse search that flouts centuries of common law requiring probable cause targeted at a specific person. The court agreed, holding that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” That’s a direct rejection of the third-party doctrine, which previously let the government grab any data you willingly handed over to a company.
What the Court Actually Said
The ruling isn’t a blanket ban on geofence warrants – it just says the Fourth Amendment applies to that data. Police still can get a warrant, but they must show probable cause linking a specific person to a crime before ordering a company to search its banks of location records. The court explicitly rejected the idea that using Google Maps or Uber counts as “voluntary” disclosure of whereabouts. In practical terms, the dragnet is dead; the targeted subpoena lives on.
What This Means for Google and Your Location Data
Google had already started storing location data on-device rather than on its servers to dodge these warrants. That move was a tacit admission that the practice was indefensible. Now the legal floor is raised across the board. Companies like Microsoft, Uber, and Yahoo – who also received geofence warrants regularly – will have to adapt similarly, or face probable-cause scrutiny every time law enforcement knocks.
The decision also remands Chatrie’s case to the Appeals Court to decide whether the original warrant showed probable cause. The DOJ hasn’t commented yet, but the era of asking a judge for a blank check to track every phone in a city block is over. Next up: how prosecutors will pivot when they can't rely on the lazy data grab, and whether tech companies accelerate the shift to client-side storage to stay out of the crosshairs.
Source: In major privacy win, Supreme Court rules geofence warrants are protected by privacy rights
Domain: techcrunch.com
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