Supreme Court agrees to decide if police can seek sweeping cellphone location data in investigations
CNN • • general
Key Points:
- The Supreme Court will review the constitutionality of geofence warrants, which allow police to access large amounts of cellphone location data to identify individuals near crime scenes, amid concerns over Fourth Amendment protections.
- Lower courts are divided on whether these warrants constitute overly broad searches, with critics arguing that they collect anonymized data from millions of innocent people not involved in crimes.
- The case under review involves a 2019 Virginia bank robbery where police used a geofence warrant to identify the suspect by obtaining location data from Google for devices near the crime scene.
- The federal government contends that geofence warrants do not violate the Fourth Amendment and emphasizes that users opt in to location services, but Google’s recent policy changes have reduced the frequency of such warrants.
 { path { fill: %23EEEFE9 } })