Supreme Court Extends Fourth Amendment to Cell Phone Location Data
The Supreme Court ruled that police collecting location data from Google is a Fourth Amendment search.
Why it matters: This ruling raises the stakes for privacy, requiring legal teams and tech developers to rethink data governance and adjust to stricter protections for location tracking.
- June 29, 2026: Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that location data from Google is protected by the Fourth Amendment.
- The case involved a 2019 armed robbery where police used a geofence warrant to collect location data within 150 meters of the crime scene.
- Justice Kagan emphasized users don't forfeit privacy by using cellphones, rejecting broad third-party data sharing doctrines.
- The Court remanded the case to lower courts to evaluate if the geofence warrant met specific Fourth Amendment standards of particularity and probable cause.
On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Chatrie v. United States, holding that government acquisition of a suspect's location data from Google constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
The case stems from a May 2019 armed robbery at a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where police secured a geofence warrant to collect anonymized location data from all cellphones within a 150-meter radius during the crime hour. Initially, data for 19 devices was obtained. Law enforcement then narrowed this down, analyzing 9 users before identifying 3 suspects.
The Court ruled 6-3 that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone location data, even when that information is held by third parties like Google. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the opinion that "a cellphone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cellphone users do." This reaffirmed privacy rights against broad government surveillance through digital means.
While the Court did not categorically reject geofence warrants, it sent the case back to the lower court to determine whether the specific warrant here satisfied Fourth Amendment requirements of particularity — clearly defining the scope of the search — and probable cause.
This ruling builds on the 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision, which extended Fourth Amendment protections to historical cell site location information. The extension now applies to real-time and aggregated digital location data accessed via geofence warrants.
For privacy lawyers, legal technology developers, and data governance teams, this decision underscores the need to update policies and systems to comply with heightened constitutional protections on location tracking and digital surveillance.
By the numbers:
- 150 meters — radius covered by the geofence warrant in Chatrie case
- 6-3 — Supreme Court vote split affirming privacy rights in location data
- 19 — anonymized users' location data initially obtained by police
Yes, but: The ruling did not declare all geofence warrants unconstitutional, leaving criteria for valid warrants to be defined by lower courts.
What's next: Lower courts must evaluate whether the specific geofence warrant in Chatrie meets Fourth Amendment requirements of particularity and probable cause.