{"id":283790,"date":"2026-06-29T17:29:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/29\/why-the-supreme-courts-geofence-ruling-doesnt-go-far-enough\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T17:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T21:40:09","slug":"why-the-supreme-courts-geofence-ruling-doesnt-go-far-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/29\/why-the-supreme-courts-geofence-ruling-doesnt-go-far-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Supreme Court\u2019s geofence ruling doesn\u2019t go far enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why the Supreme Court\u2019s geofence ruling doesn\u2019t go far enough<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.ms.now\/opinion\/supreme-court-privacy-geofence-location-data<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-29 17:29:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.ms.now<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At issue was whether law enforcement can use a \u201cgeofence warrant\u201d to demand location information from Google about customers, here including Okello Chatrie, whose phones happened to be near a crime scene. The government\u2019s answer: Yes, because once you share your location with Google, you have no Fourth Amendment interest in it and a warrant isn\u2019t required anyway.<\/p>\n

The Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows from that ownership?<\/p>\n

The Court disagreed. Privacy advocates are celebrating. But Justice Elena Kagan\u2019s majority opinion missed the opportunity to declare that a person\u2019s location data belongs to him, even if it is stored on the servers at a company like Google. upThe majority calls the records \u201chis\u201d freely, even likening them to Chatrie\u2019s 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 \u201csociety\u201d is prepared to recognize a person\u2019s \u201cexpectation of privacy\u201d as reasonable.<\/p>\n

So the Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows from that ownership?<\/p>\n

After decades applying a Fourth Amendment doctrine that \u201cprotects people, not places,\u201d the Court cannot cobble together a majority to name a person or a thing the Amendment protects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chatrie is today\u2019s chapter in the story of a mistake Americans…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why the Supreme Court\u2019s geofence ruling doesn\u2019t go far enough https:\/\/www.ms.now\/opinion\/supreme-court-privacy-geofence-location-data Publish Date: 2026-06-29 17:29:00…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":283791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/260629-supreme-court-washington-dc-scotus-justices-government-es.webp?crop=95px,277px,1505px,790px&w=1200&h=630","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283792,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283790\/revisions\/283792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}