SUPREME COURT RULES GOOGLE ‘GEOFENCE’ PHONE TRACKING IS A SEARCH IN MAJOR PRIVACY SHIFT

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that law enforcement officers invade a cell phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy when they access historical location data through Google “geofence” warrants. In a majority opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court held that tracking a person’s physical movements via commercial location databases constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, even if the data covers a brief period or is held by a third-party technology company.

The case, Chatrie v. United States, originated from the May 20, 2019, robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. A robber brandished a firearm, forced the bank manager to open a safe, and fled on foot with $195,000.

Local investigators discovered through surveillance footage and witness interviews that the suspect had approached the building while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but they could not establish his identity.

To find a suspect, police applied to a Virginia magistrate on June 14, 2019, for a geofence warrant targeting Google. The warrant established a 150-meter virtual radius around the credit union and ordered the company to provide information from its Location History database, which tracks opted-in users every two minutes using GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell tower signals.

The warrant utilized a three-step protocol developed by Google and law enforcement to narrow down suspects. At step one, Google produced anonymized location data for all cell phones within the geofence during a one-hour window surrounding the robbery. At step two, officers narrowed the list to nine devices, prompting Google to provide an extended two-hour log of those users’ movements both inside and outside the geofence. At step three, police narrowed the list to three users, and Google turned over their personal identifying information, including names and phone numbers.

The data revealed that petitioner Okello Chatrie entered the geofence ten minutes before the robbery and walked toward a residential area immediately after leaving the bank. A federal grand jury later charged Chatrie with robbery and firearms offenses. Chatrie moved to suppress the evidence, arguing the digital dragnet violated his constitutional rights.

The legal battle split lower courts. The federal district court found that the geofence warrant plainly violated the Fourth Amendment but allowed the evidence under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on different grounds, ruling that no search occurred because Chatrie voluntarily exposed his data to Google. The full Fourth Circuit later split 7-7 en banc, leaving the conviction in place.

The Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit’s finding that no search occurred, drawing heavily from its 2018 precedent in Carpenter v. United States, which protected weeks-long cell-site location records. Justice Kagan rejected the government’s argument that a two-hour window of location tracking was too brief to trigger constitutional protections.

Kagan noted that smartphones are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Because Google’s Location History tool can pinpoint a phone within 20 meters and estimate its elevation inside buildings, the court concluded that allowing the government unrestricted access to such databases would arm it with “a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities.”

The court also dismissed the government’s reliance on the “third-party doctrine,” which traditionally holds that people lose privacy expectations for info they share with businesses. The majority ruled that smartphone users do not truly share their location data in a conventional sense. The opinion emphasized that Google continuously prompts users to enable Location History, sometimes warning that features will not work correctly otherwise, without fully disclosing how precise the tracking is or that the data can be surrendered to the government.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Kagan’s opinion. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion, joined by Sotomayor, arguing that the warrant gave police too much unmonitored discretion to expand their search during steps two and three without judicial oversight. Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment, stating he would have decided the case by treating the location history data as Chatrie’s personal property under traditional property rights rather than using the expectation-of-privacy framework.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett dissented. Writing for the dissent, Alito characterized the majority’s constitutional ruling as an “advisory opinion” because it did not address the lower court’s good-faith ruling, which independently kept Chatrie’s conviction intact. Alito also pointed out that the specific geofence procedure is largely obsolete, as Google altered its system in July 2025 to store Location History directly on user devices rather than company servers, leaving the company unable to comply with such warrants.

The Supreme Court did not rule on whether the specific warrant used against Chatrie was ultimately valid. Instead, the justices vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case, leaving it to the lower court to determine whether the multi-step warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause at each stage of the search.

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