GoKawiilThe Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.
Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.
The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.
The US tried and failed to argue that no search was conducted under the Fourth Amendment, partly because they only searched a little bit of Chatrie’s location data, which the government considered too small to warrant privacy protections.
They also claimed that Chatrie was aware that voluntarily sharing his location with Google could mean that law enforcement might get access to the data. And along similar lines, the government argued that Chatrie’s data simply showed his movements in public, where he supposedly had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
However, Justice Elena Kagan, penning the majority opinion, said it didn’t matter how much data the government obtained. It was still a search under the Fourth Amendment because people carrying cellphones today commonly opt in to location-tracking, so that their apps work.
“Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not ‘work correctly’ otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users’ location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government,” the majority agreed.