Supreme Court Extends Privacy Protections to Phone Location Data

In Chatrie v. United States, the justices held 6-3 that people are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy in records of where their phones have been, even in public. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said police “intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information,” even briefly and from a third-party company like Google.

Instead of naming a suspect and requesting their records, as they would in a traditional warrant, police draw a virtual boundary around a place and a span of time, then ask a company to turn over data on every device inside it — whether or not those people had any link to the crime. In the Chatrie case, police in Richmond, Virginia, used a so-called “geofence warrant” covering more than 70,000 square meters — more than 13 football fields — of a busy area to find an armed bank robber, vacuuming up data of everyone else nearby in the process.

“[Geofence warrants are] the equivalent of going to every home, every apartment, every tent in the city,” Villaran said. “I have no reason to suspect that you were there; I’m going to search your phone anyway. That’s the broadest imaginable search.”

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in Monday’s case, has fought these warrants for years, arguing they amount to unconstitutional general searches by design. The group welcomed the ruling, saying even brief tracking can reveal intimate details of a person’s life — where they worship, who they associate with, their political activity, their relationships.

EFF said the ruling was important because the justices affirmed that data generated by the apps on a phone belongs to the owner and is protected, even when shared with a tech company.

Gadeir Abbas, attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has represented clients challenging the seizure and search of their phones, said the ruling matters far beyond geofencing. For decades, courts have generally held that information a person gives to a third party, such as a phone carrier or an internet provider, isn’t constitutionally protected — a principle known as the third-party doctrine. The court’s reasoning, he said, breaks from that assumption, at least for location data.

“It’s data that your phone gives to another company automatically as you move about the world,” Abbas said, adding that the court found that sharing it doesn’t surrender a person’s expectation of privacy.

The decision is narrow in scope. The justices ruled only that accessing the data is a search; they left it to a lower court to decide whether the specific warrant in the Chatrie case was valid, a process Abbas estimated could take another five to seven years.

The opinion is also limited to smartphone location data, leaving open how it applies to laptops, IP addresses or other digital records.

Abbas sees broader stakes for anyone whose devices can be searched, especially travelers. He has represented clients whose phones were seized repeatedly at the border; one man, he said, had five devices taken before the government relented. Abbas noted that Customs and Border Protection agents can currently search and seize a phone based on what he called a vaguely defined “national security concern,” and that this is a standard he said falls short of reasonable suspicion.

A ruling like this one, he said, “foretells the end of that practice.” He called it “another brick in the wall against that kind of lawless government surveillance.”

Villaran noted that the Bay Area has long been a testing ground for this fight. In 2022, a San Francisco court ruled in People v. Dawes — a case Villaran litigated for the public defender’s office — that a geofence warrant issued to the San Francisco Police Department violated both the Fourth Amendment and California’s electronic privacy law. It was the first time a state court suppressed evidence from such a warrant.

That California law, known as CalECPA, is part of what makes the state’s protections stronger than what the Supreme Court just established nationally, Villaran said. Chatrie rests on the Fourth Amendment alone. California layers CalECPA on top, spelling out specific rules the government must follow to obtain electronic data and offering remedies beyond what the Fourth Amendment provides.

Villaran said lasting change is more likely to come from legislation like CalECPA than from individual defendants fighting warrants one at a time. She also noted that Google has largely stopped responding to geofence warrants. However, law enforcement agencies have made the request of other tech companies like Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Microsoft and Yahoo, according to The New York Times, which makes the ruling still relevant.

“I think that most folks would be horrified to know they were part of a huge dragnet search to see if they were in a certain part of the city at a certain time,” she said.