The Supreme Court made a significant ruling on Monday, stating that law enforcement officers invade a cell phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy when they access historical location data through Google ‘geofence’ warrants.
Background of the Case
The case, Chatrie v. United States, originated from a 2019 robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Local investigators used a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Google, which led them to the suspect, Okello Chatrie.
The warrant established a 150-meter virtual radius around the credit union and ordered Google to provide information from its Location History database. The data revealed that Chatrie entered the geofence ten minutes before the robbery and walked toward a residential area immediately after leaving the bank.
Supreme Court Ruling
In a majority opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court held that tracking a person’s physical movements via commercial location databases constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, even if the data covers a brief period or is held by a third-party technology company.
The court also dismissed the government’s reliance on the ‘third-party doctrine,’ which traditionally holds that people lose privacy expectations for information they share with businesses. The majority ruled that smartphone users do not truly share their location data in a conventional sense.
Original reporting: Tampa Free Press — read the source article.
