WASHINGTON — A U.S. Supreme Court ruling has strengthened constitutional protections for cellphone location information, holding that law enforcement conducts a search under the Fourth Amendment when it obtains users' location-history data from technology companies, while sending a closely watched criminal case back to a lower court for further review.
In a 6-3 decision issued on June 29, the court ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in records showing where their cellphones have been, even when that information is held by a third-party company such as Google. The decision extended the court's earlier digital privacy jurisprudence but stopped short of declaring all so-called geofence warrants unconstitutional.
The case arose from the prosecution of Okello Chatrie, who challenged investigators' use of a geofence warrant after a 2019 Virginia credit union robbery. The warrant required Google to provide location-history information for devices detected near the crime scene during a specified period, ultimately leading investigators to Chatrie, who later entered a conditional guilty plea while preserving his constitutional challenge.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said the Constitution protects individuals against unjustified government intrusion into their cellphone location records. The court rejected the government's argument that users automatically lose privacy protections because the data is stored by a third party, finding that detailed location histories reveal extensive information about people's movements and daily lives.
Rather than deciding whether the specific warrant used in Chatrie's case satisfied constitutional requirements, the justices vacated the lower court's judgment and instructed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the warrant met the Fourth Amendment's standards, including probable cause and particularity.
The ruling leaves geofence warrants available in some circumstances but subjects their use to constitutional scrutiny. Legal experts have said the decision is likely to influence future criminal investigations that rely on digital location records collected by technology companies. Privacy advocates welcomed the decision as an important safeguard against broad location-data sweeps, while law enforcement officials have argued that geofence warrants can be valuable investigative tools when suspects are initially unknown.
The case now returns to the Fourth Circuit, which will determine whether the warrant at issue complied with the Fourth Amendment under the legal framework outlined by the Supreme Court.
