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A landmark ruling in the US Supreme Court means that cellphone location data is now protected by the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. Here, we'll explain what exactly that means and why it matters.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.In a ruling handed down on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court declared that scooping up someone's cellphone location data officially counts as a search that requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment.
“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion, said in the ruling.
What are geofence warrants?
The ruling centers on the concept of geofence warrants, a controversial tech-assisted legal tool that allows law enforcement to trawl through data to find every active mobile device within a particular location.
In other words, if a crime occurs, police and the FBI can find out who was within a set radius of the scene by obtaining a warrant for smartphone location data from tech companies like Google, Uber, Apple, and more.
If you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, your exact whereabouts and information about you can be seen by police – whether you're guilty or not. You might even be wrongly suspected of being a criminal, just because you were passing by a crime scene with your phone in your pocket.
This data is now protected, but the protection comes with one major caveat. That's because many users voluntarily share their location data with Google and other tech companies when setting up their phones or signing into different platforms.
Under the "third-party doctrine," that could theoretically mean you've surrendered your Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy because you handed the data over yourself. If that's the case, obtaining it wouldn't strictly count as a "search" requiring constitutional protection at all.
If that seems a little off to you, you're not alone. The use and abuse of geofence warrants has repeatedly raised eyebrows, with many questioning whether they are constitutional and legally sound.
Geofence warrants are no longer used only in extreme or high-profile cases. Their frequency has risen steadily since they were first employed in 2016, and several thousand are now dished out each year. Across the US, geofence requests to Google reportedly increased from 941 in 2018 to 11,033 in 2020. If the trend is anything to go by, the figure will be even higher in 2026.
Why geofence warrants have been challenged
The latest ruling arose from a case in which law enforcement used a geofence warrant to catch a man who stole $195,000 from a credit union in Virginia on May 20, 2019. The suspect, Okello Chatrie, was eventually tracked down, arrested, and charged, largely thanks to phone data that Google handed over.
First, Google was asked by local police to produce anonymized location data of all phones within 150 meters (492 feet) of the credit union during a one-hour window around the robbery. Police then narrowed the list and received additional location data for those devices. Finally, Google provided the names and phone numbers tied to the remaining phones. This revealed three users, including the suspected robber.
Chatrie’s lawyers argued that this search was overly broad and violated his Fourth Amendment rights. They claimed that the defendant was essentially unaware he had consented to give his data to Google and, in turn, law enforcement.
In the latest ruling, Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that geofence warrants did qualify as searches under the Fourth Amendment.
"The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found the geofence warrant 'plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment' but denied the motion to suppress the evidence, applying the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule," the ruling reads.
What are the implications of the ruling?
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. It's the part of the law that requires police to obtain a warrant if they want to search your property.
The ruling doesn't necessarily mean geofence warrants are unconstitutional, but it does mean courts and law enforcement will have to reassess how freely they're used, and it could raise the threshold needed to obtain them in the future.
It could also serve as a precedent for future cases when lawyers think the use of smartphone location data has gone too far.
While it’s still unclear exactly how this will play out in practice, privacy advocates have welcomed the ruling and suggested it's a push in the right direction.
“In recent years, police around the country have relied on geofence warrants like the one in this case tens of thousands of times to cast dragnets that violate the privacy of innocent bystanders, all without even targeting a known suspect or device,” Andrew Crocker at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech privacy organization, said in a statement.
“Although the Court stopped short of striking down these warrants as inherently unconstitutional, we look forward to pressing lower courts to eliminate these warrants once and for all," said Crocker.
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