Your Phone's Location Data Is Now Protected by the Fourth Amendment
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects smartphone location history. In a 6–3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court decided that when police obtain historical location records from companies like Google or Apple, they conduct a search under the Constitution and must respect privacy rights.
The case is about a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia, in which police used a "geofence warrant" to obtain data from all devices near the scene during a specific time period. Using Google's Location History, police narrowed the pool of devices and identified the suspect.
Lower courts upheld law enforcement's right to use this method, arguing that if a user agreed to provide their location datato a technology company, they abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy. But the Supreme Court ruled that accessing this kind of data violates a person's reasonable expectation of privacy, even...
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