Supreme Court rules your cellphone location data is protected by the Fourth Amendment

Key Points:

• On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that obtaining an individual's cell location data from third-party tech companies constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants based on probable cause and particularity.
• The case involves a geofence warrant used by police to identify every cellphone in a 17½-acre area during a bank robbery investigation, a method that raises privacy concerns due to its broad and reverse warrant nature.
• Geofence warrants compel companies like Google to provide anonymized lists of devices in a specified area and time, followed by a process where law enforcement can request identifying information, often without ongoing judicial oversight.
• The ruling affirms that cellphone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their location data, rejecting government claims of tacit consent and no privacy expectation in third-party records, thereby strengthening digital privacy protections.
• The Supreme Court remanded the case to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to determine whether the specific geofence warrant and its multistep search process comply with Fourth Amendment requirements, highlighting ongoing legal scrutiny of geofence searches.