The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled that constitutional privacy protections apply to cellphone location history, in a case involving a bank robbery in which investigators used a geofence warrant to identify a suspect, the Associated Press(AP) reported from Washington.
Writing for the 6–3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan said individuals do not lose their expectation of privacy simply because they use services such as Google’s location history.
She rejected the argument that ordinary cellphone use amounts to voluntary sharing of private information with third parties.
“A cellphone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cellphone users do,” Kagan wrote.
The case centred on Okello Chatrie, who was identified after police used a geofence warrant following a bank robbery in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, in May 2019.
The warrant allowed investigators to obtain data on devices that were near the crime scene at the time of the robbery.
One of the devices identified belonged to Chatrie, who had initially evaded arrest.
Police later obtained a search warrant for his home, where they recovered nearly $100,000 in cash, including bundles marked by a bank teller.
Chatrie later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
His lawyers argued that the evidence should be excluded because it was obtained through an unconstitutional search that captured data from people with no connection to the crime.
Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting, argued that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy over data voluntarily shared with Google.
The Court did not rule directly on whether the geofence search violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Instead, it sent the case back to a lower court for further review.
Lower courts had issued mixed rulings, with one judge initially finding the search unconstitutional but still admitting the evidence, while an appeals court later upheld the conviction.
Another federal appeals court has previously described geofence warrants as “general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”
