This is a great victory for the right to privacy.
The United States Supreme Court has just issued a ruling limiting geofence searches by law enforcement, which could have major consequences for privacy rights across the country. For the uninitiated, this is a relatively new police technique in which police tap into tech company databases to see who was near the scene of a crime.
In the 6-3 ruling, the nation’s highest court said that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to his or her cell phone location information.” Justice Elena Kagan said the geofence warrants violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban against unreasonable searches. In the future, law enforcement will need to obtain an actual search warrant to force a technology company to hand over geofence location data. Search warrants require probable cause, while geofence warrants do not.
The case that led to this decision involved a theft in Virginia, according to a report from NPR. A man stole $195,000 from a bank and the case went cold until detectives served Google with a geolocation warrant. They obtained location information from cell phone users near the bank during the hour before and after the crime was committed.
Google responded in kind, providing police with only three of the 19 people identified as being near the bank. However, it was one of these three that turned out to be the culprit.
Okello Chatrie confessed, but his lawyers argued in their filings that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow government entities to “search first and develop suspicion later.” In this case, the geofence search forced Google to review the data of millions of users. In other words, these people were searched without having done anything suspicious.
We do not know what impact today’s decision will have on previous court cases that used geofence warrants. The decision is not expected to change Chatrie’s sentence, according to a report from TechCrunch.
As for the government, it has argued in its filings that location data is not constitutionally protected on the grounds that people “choose” to transmit it by not turning off system-wide location-based services and background app tracking on phones.
