High-tech crime-fighting, privacy rights square off in Supreme Court battle
High-tech crime-fighting, privacy rights square off in Supreme Court battle
Publish Date: 2026-04-30 07:00:00
Source Domain: chicago.suntimes.com
Seven years ago, police in Midlothian, Virginia, sought to identify a bank robber by asking Google to search the records of more than 500 million people who used the company’s “location history” feature. That search identified 19 devices that were in or near the bank around the time of the robbery, which police winnowed down to three people, including Okello Chatrie, the man who was ultimately convicted of the crime.
Depending on your perspective, that use of a “geofence” warrant was either an unobjectionable example of smart police work or an outrageous invasion of privacy. On Monday, the Supreme Court weighed the merits of those contending views in a case that illustrates the threat that two dubious doctrines pose to Fourth Amendment rights now that Americans routinely entrust huge volumes of personal information to tech companies that help them with myriad quotidian tasks.
In 1967, the Supreme Court said the Fourth Amendment applies only when you have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” In subsequent cases that involved bank and telephone records, the court said you have no such expectation when you voluntarily share information with third parties for their own business use.
The problems with those principles were clear in a 2018 case that addressed the FBI’s tracking of a robbery suspect via location data collected by cellphone sites. Although the majority held that such tracking generally requires a warrant, that conclusion was hard to reconcile with the third-party rule, as Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in his dissent.
Chatrie’s case is broadly similar, except that the information used to identify him was collected by his own phone rather than cell sites. Although Google no longer keeps such data on its servers, many commonly used apps track the whereabouts of their users, and that information is often stored remotely.
In…
