The Supreme Court just made it harder for police to track your phone
Your phone keeps a minute-by-minute diary of where you go. The US Supreme Court has now ruled that police cannot simply demand it. In a major win for digital privacy, the court said geofence searches need a warrant.
The 6-3 decision lands on a practice that has quietly spread through US policing. When investigators have a crime scene but no suspect, they draw a virtual box on a map and ask a tech company who was inside it. The court has just made that far harder to do.
What the court decided
The ruling came in Chatrie v. United States, a case built on a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia. The justices held that pulling a person’s phone-location records is a search under the Fourth Amendment. So police need a warrant backed by probable cause.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the controlling opinion, joined by four colleagues, with...
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