Why the Supreme Court’s geofence ruling doesn’t go far enough
Why the Supreme Court’s geofence ruling doesn’t go far enough
https://www.ms.now/opinion/supreme-court-privacy-geofence-location-data
Publish Date: 2026-06-29 17:29:00
Source Domain: www.ms.now
The Supreme Court held today in Chatrie v. United States that the government conducted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it acquired digital records about the cell phone location of a man accused of robbing a bank. This means that police generally need a warrant to obtain your location information from a service provider like Google. But what this means for other types of private information or media held digitally by countless service providers we rely upon daily is all but clear.
At issue was whether law enforcement can use a “geofence warrant” to demand location information from Google about customers, here including Okello Chatrie, whose phones happened to be near a crime scene. The government’s answer: Yes, because once you share your location with Google, you have no Fourth Amendment interest in it and a warrant isn’t required anyway.
The Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows from that ownership?
The Court disagreed. Privacy advocates are celebrating. But Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion missed the opportunity to declare that a person’s location data belongs to him, even if it is stored on the servers at a company like Google. upThe majority calls the records “his” freely, even likening them to Chatrie’s own emails and photos. What it refuses to do is let that ownership decide the case. And thus, the privacy test stays what it has been since 1967: whether “society” is prepared to recognize a person’s “expectation of privacy” as reasonable.
So the Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows from that ownership?
After decades applying a Fourth Amendment doctrine that “protects people, not places,” the Court cannot cobble together a majority to name a person or a thing the Amendment protects.
Chatrie is today’s chapter in the story of a mistake Americans…
