By MES Dispatch Staff
The Briefing
- The U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that constitutional privacy protections extend to cellphone location information, ruling 6-3 that people do not forfeit expectations of privacy merely by opting into Google’s location history feature.
- Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion in the case of Okello Chatrie, whose location was discovered through a geofence warrant used to identify cellphones near a Virginia bank at the time of a May 2019 robbery.
- Police obtained a geofence warrant following the bank robbery at Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, identified Chatrie’s phone among those near the bank, then obtained a search warrant for his home and found nearly $100,000 in cash with bank-wrapped bands.
- Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison, but his lawyers appealed, arguing the geofence warrant violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
- The Supreme Court did not decide the constitutional merits of the search itself but instead returned the case to a lower court, establishing that cellphone location data receives privacy protection under constitutional law.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court held Monday that constitutional privacy protections extend to cellular location information obtained through geofence warrants, ruling that citizens do not surrender Fourth Amendment protections simply by opting into a technology company’s location history service.
Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan stated that privacy expectations persist even when individuals voluntarily enable location tracking through Google or other platforms. The court rejected the government’s argument that users who voluntarily share location data with technology companies forfeit privacy rights enforceable against government searches.
Kagan stated in the opinion that individuals should not be viewed as surrendering privacy rights to government agencies simply by engaging in ordinary uses of cellphone technology. She emphasized that voluntary data sharing with private companies does not automatically place that information at the government’s disposal.
The case originated from a May 2019 bank robbery at Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. Police obtained a geofence warrant—a powerful technological tool that identifies all cellphones present in a defined geographic area during a specific time period—and used it to locate phones near the bank at the time of the robbery.
The warrant identified cellphones in the vicinity, and investigators determined that Okello Chatrie’s phone had been near the bank during the robbery. Police then obtained a separate search warrant for Chatrie’s home and discovered nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands bearing the signature of a bank teller.
Chatrie pleaded guilty to the bank robbery and received a sentence of nearly 12 years in federal prison. His attorneys appealed the conviction, arguing that the initial geofence warrant violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches because it allowed authorities to gather location data on potentially innocent people near the bank without probable cause to believe they had involvement in the robbery.
The government argued that Chatrie had voluntarily provided location data to Google by opting into the company’s location history feature and therefore had no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. Prosecutors contended that once information is voluntarily shared with a third party, the government may access it without additional constitutional restrictions.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that Chatrie had knowingly and voluntarily transmitted his location information to Google and therefore relinquished any privacy claim to that data.
The Supreme Court’s decision did not resolve whether the specific search of Chatrie’s phone location history complied with Fourth Amendment standards. Instead, the court established the foundational principle that privacy protections apply to such information and remanded the case to a lower court for further proceedings consistent with the majority’s ruling.
A federal trial judge had previously ruled that the search violated Chatrie’s constitutional rights but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who obtained the warrant reasonably believed his actions were lawful under the law then in effect.
A federal appeals court in Richmond had upheld Chatrie’s conviction in a fractured decision. In contrast, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled in a separate case that geofence warrants constitute general warrants categorically prohibited under the Fourth Amendment.
The ruling represents the Supreme Court’s latest effort to apply constitutional provisions ratified in 1791 to technologies the nation’s founders could not have envisioned.