US supreme court hears whether smartphone location data warrants infringe users’ privacy | Technology
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/27/us-supreme-court-smartphone-location-data-privacy
Publish Date: 2026-04-27 18:33:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
The US supreme court is considering whether sprawling warrants for smartphone location data infringe on Americans’ privacy rights and violate the constitution.
Justices heard opening arguments in Chatrie v United States on Monday that concerned law enforcement’s reliance on so-called “geofence warrants” in difficult cases. The case was originally brought by Okello Chatrie, whose phone location data helped police in Richmond, Virginia, track him down after he robbed a bank at gunpoint and escaped with $195,000 in 2019. Chatrie pleaded guilty to armed robbery and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but his lawyers argue none of the evidence against him should have been admissible in court.
A lawyer for the US Department of Justice argued that nearly any actions taken in public while in possession of a smartphone afforded no expectation of privacy.
“An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see, that he has opted to allow a third party to analyze for its own purposes,” the US solicitor general, a high-ranking lawyer for Donald Trump’s administration, has argued in legal filings.
Law enforcement is increasingly demanding that tech companies hand over sensitive phone location data on people at or near a site where a suspected crime occurred – anyone who falls within the radius of a virtual “fence”. These geofence warrants, rather than specifying their targets, instead compel tech companies to hand over data to police or the FBI on every electronic device in a particular place at a given time.
Privacy advocates and some legal experts view geofence searches as a dragnet that sweeps up innocent bystanders. “Just because you have a cell phone, should you be subjected to all sorts of law enforcement investigations because of crimes that may have happened in your vicinity?” said Paul Ohm, a law professor at Georgetown University, who submitted an amicus brief in the case. These warrants can lead to an…
