In a blow to law enforcement, the U.S. Supreme Court has voted 6-3 that law enforcement can't just use sweeping "geofence warrants" to collect smartphone location data. Instead, that data requires privacy protection under the fourth amendment, even if the required data only covers a short period of time.The ruling in question relates to a case from 2019, when Virginia police used a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Android phones near the scene of a bank robbery which saw an armed suspect flee with $195,000. Google initially provided officers with anonymized locations for 19 devices, which police were able to narrow down to nine potential suspects and eventually three identified users.Police eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who was indicted by a federal grand jury after pleading guilty to charges relating to armed robbery, resulting in a 12 year prison sentence. However, Chatrie's lawyers had argued that the police search was overly broad, and violated his constitutional rights under the fourth amendment (which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure).
(Image credit: Shutterstock)The government had argued against this claiming that accessing a short amount of location information means that geofence warrants aren't categorized as a fourth amendment search — and thus doesn't need to be afforded the same privacy protections.The Supreme Court has just ruled against this argument — ruling that police obtaining detailed cellphone location history from a tech company does constitute a fourth amendment search.Since location data collected through ordinary use can offer a huge amount of personal information, the decision's been made to give it the same level of protection from unreasonable search and seizure as other personal information.What does this mean for you?
