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In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to track your movements through your cell phone records. The decision seemed like a watershed moment for digital privacy—a recognition that the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches had to evolve alongside technology.
Eight years later, we’re finding out just how much that case left unresolved.
On January 16, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Chatrie v. United States, a case that will determine whether police can collect detailed location histories for hundreds or thousands of innocent people in order to identify potential suspects near crime scenes. The tool at issue—called a geofence warrant—has been used thousands of times across the country, often without the public knowing it existed.
How Geofence Warrants Work
Geofence warrants flip the entire investigative process backward. Normally, police start with a suspect and investigate whether that person committed a crime. With a geofence warrant, they start with a place—say, a 150-meter radius around a bank that was robbed—and ask a tech company (usually Google) to hand over location data for every device that appeared there during a specific time window. The initial data comes back anonymized, showing movement patterns of devices rather than names. Police review these patterns looking for anything suspicious: a device that entered the area around the time of the crime, lingered briefly, then left. Only after narrowing down the list do they ask for the actual identities.
The tool has been deployed for everything from investigating the January 6 Capitol riot to tracking down suspects in armed robberies to solving cases involving smashed windows.
Every time police execute one of these warrants, they’re examining location data for hundreds or thousands of people who had nothing to do with any crime. People who were shopping, working, or passing through. The data gets collected and analyzed anyway, because police have no way of knowing in advance which devices belong to perpetrators and which belong to someone who happened to be in the area.
Your phone generates this data automatically whenever you use certain Google services or have location history enabled—which, for many users, is the default setting.
The Constitutional Problem
The Fourth Amendment requires that searches be reasonable and that warrants describe “with particularity” what’s being searched and seized. The question dividing the courts is whether collecting location data on hundreds of innocent people—with no individualized suspicion whatsoever—violates that principle.
Federal appeals courts can’t agree on the answer. The Fifth Circuit says geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Circuit upheld them, though the judges offered “wildly varying reasons” for doing so. Some said geofence requests aren’t even a “search” under the Constitution because the data is held by a third party like Google. Others applied the “good faith exception,” which allows evidence to be used even when a warrant was flawed, as long as the officer reasonably believed they were acting lawfully. Still others sidestepped the core question entirely.
When different circuits interpret the Constitution differently, the Supreme Court typically steps in.
The 2019 Bank Robbery Case
The case centers on a 2019 robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia—a suburb of Richmond. Police obtained a geofence warrant asking Google for location data on all devices within 150 meters of the bank during a one-hour window around the robbery.
Google returned the initial anonymized list. Then police went back to Google twice more—without seeking new warrants—requesting additional information. First, they asked for movement data over a longer two-hour period. Then they requested the de-anonymized subscriber information for three specific device owners.
Defense lawyers pointed out that geofence warrants could be used to determine who was present at abortion clinics, political protests, religious gatherings, or any other sensitive location. Police could surveil First Amendment-protected activities by drawing a geographic boundary and requesting the data.
What the 2018 Decision Left Unresolved
The 2018 decision recognized that location data reveals extraordinarily intimate details about people’s lives—where they pray, whom they visit, where they work, where they sleep. The Court concluded that this information deserves Fourth Amendment protection even though it’s held by a third party rather than in someone’s home.
The decision rejected an older rule that information shared with a third party automatically loses constitutional protection.
But the case left open a question: what about searches that don’t target a specific person but instead sweep up everyone in a geographic area?
The Justice Department argues that geofence warrants are fundamentally different. In the earlier case, law enforcement sought location data about an identified suspect—they targeted particular records from a particular person. In a geofence warrant, police don’t target anyone specifically; they’re asking for all location data from an area. The Trump administration’s Solicitor General told the Court that Chatrie had voluntarily opted into Google’s location history service, arguably diminishing any privacy expectation. The government also compared location data to physical evidence left at a crime scene—something investigators are free to use.
Privacy advocates say the 2018 decision’s logic points the other way. If anything, geofence warrants are more problematic because they’re broader—sweeping up data on numerous innocent people rather than targeting identified suspects. The width of the net is what makes geofence warrants resemble the general warrants that the Founders sought to prevent through the Fourth Amendment.
General warrants allowed British officers to search anywhere and everywhere hoping to find evidence of a crime, without identifying a particular place or person. The American colonists’ experience with them was so traumatic that preventing their use became a central purpose of the Fourth Amendment. Geofence warrants let police examine everyone’s location data in an area—not knowing in advance who might be guilty—resembling the very thing the amendment was designed to stop.
Practical Implications
If the Supreme Court decides geofence warrants are unconstitutional without significant limitations, thousands of ongoing investigations could be affected. Police departments have relied on this tool extensively; ruling them unconstitutional would force law enforcement back to more traditional methods, potentially making certain crimes harder to solve.
If the Court upholds them, police will have essentially unrestricted ability to examine the location histories of entire neighborhoods or cities without meaningful constraints. The outcome will likely fall somewhere between these extremes, with the Court potentially establishing specific limitations on when and how geofence warrants can be used.
Google changed its practices before the Court even heard arguments. The company altered its policies so that location data is now stored locally on individual devices rather than maintained in centralized company servers. This technical change means geofence warrants like the one used in Chatrie’s case wouldn’t be possible under Google’s current system.
The Solicitor General highlighted this to the Court, arguing it “significantly diminishes” the need for strict constitutional limits. Privacy advocates counter that other tech companies might not make similar changes, and the constitutional question remains important regardless of Google’s policy. The question isn’t about what Google does today—it’s about what the Fourth Amendment permits the government to do.
Extent of Use
Precise nationwide statistics are hard to come by because police departments have no uniform reporting requirement. But available evidence suggests the tool has been deployed extensively for an increasingly broad range of offenses—from major armed robberies and the January 6 investigation to petty theft and property damage.
Law enforcement served geofence warrants on Google seeking location data for devices that appeared within the Capitol building or nearby areas during the riot. The warrants proved effective in identifying numerous individuals, helping prosecutors build cases.
The same capability could be turned toward surveilling peaceful protesters, religious gatherings, political meetings, or any other activity that law enforcement—or future administrations—might view with suspicion. The tool’s neutral technical capacity to locate everyone in a particular place at a particular time can be weaponized against innocent First Amendment activity as easily as against criminal conduct.
International Approaches
While the Supreme Court prepares to rule under American constitutional law, other democracies have grappled with similar questions and reached different answers.
In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation provides strong protections over personal data, including location information, regardless of whether it’s been shared with third parties. Even if someone has permitted Google to collect location data, law enforcement seeking that data must demonstrate an appropriate legal basis, and EU data protection authorities may scrutinize whether such access is proportionate to the government’s aims.
Canada’s Supreme Court has recognized privacy interests in IP addresses—which can reveal location and identity information—establishing that such digital identifiers attract a reasonable expectation of privacy even when shared with third parties. British law enforcement generally must obtain a warrant before accessing historical location records.
These international approaches share a principle: the fact that location data is held by a third party doesn’t automatically strip it of privacy protection, and government access to such intimate information should be restricted by law rather than left to police discretion.
Broader Surveillance Landscape
The 2018 decision seemed to establish that location data deserves Fourth Amendment protection. But in the years since, the gap between that principle and actual practice has grown wider.
Geofence warrants represent one example. Police have also begun using keyword search warrants, which allow them to request all Google searches containing a particular term. License plate readers now track vehicles’ movements across entire cities. Facial recognition systems can identify individuals from surveillance camera footage. Each technology raises its own constitutional questions and operates in a legal gray area while courts work through the implications.
Technology moves faster than constitutional law. By the time the Supreme Court rules on geofence warrants, law enforcement may have already developed alternative approaches that accomplish similar surveillance goals through different technical means. Police could request data through different warrant mechanisms, obtain information from cellular carriers instead of tech companies, or rely more heavily on other surveillance technologies.
The issues at stake in Chatrie won’t disappear with a Court ruling—they’ll shift to new technological and legal terrain.
What’s Really at Stake
This case isn’t about whether one investigative tool is constitutional. It’s about whether Americans have meaningful privacy protection in an age when intimate details about our lives are continuously collected, recorded, and stored by technology companies.
In the pre-smartphone era, your location history was essentially private by default—invisible to the state unless police conducted physical surveillance or someone happened to observe and report your movements. Today, most people’s location history is continuously recorded by their smartphones and transmitted to various companies.
The question is whether that technological shift should diminish constitutional protection or strengthen it. Should location data’s ubiquity and the ease with which police can access it reduce privacy rights? Or should the intimate nature of location information receive heightened protection because it can reveal so much about a person’s life, beliefs, associations, and behavior?
The Supreme Court’s answer will determine not just how police investigate crimes but how much privacy Americans can expect in their daily lives. If the Court permits broad geofence surveillance, Americans should understand that law enforcement can examine their location history by obtaining a warrant to search a geographic area—without establishing any suspicion that they personally were involved in any crime.
Timeline and Next Steps
Oral arguments are expected in spring 2026, with a decision by the end of June. The Court could rule narrowly, addressing only the specific facts of Chatrie’s case, or issue a broader decision establishing clear rules for when and how geofence warrants can be used.
Tech companies are watching closely. X (formerly Twitter) filed an amicus brief asking the Court to consider companies’ contractual promises to users about protecting their data. If companies are forced to turn over users’ location data too easily, it could undermine trust in their platforms and potentially expose them to legal liability.
Privacy advocates have also weighed in, with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability supporting Chatrie’s position.
Whatever the Court decides will reshape law enforcement practices nationwide and define the boundaries of privacy protection for one of the most revealing forms of personal information available to government authorities. If the Court restricts geofence warrants, police will need to adapt their investigative practices. If it permits them with minimal constraints, the surveillance capabilities available to law enforcement will expand significantly.
The decision will influence not just current investigations but the technological and legal landscape for privacy protection in America for years to come.
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