Supreme Court rules geofence warrants are Fourth Amendment searches

In a 6-3 decision in Chatrie v US, the Supreme Court held that bulk location data pulled from smartphones via ‘geofence warrants’ qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment, entitling individuals to privacy protections even when they are in public. Writing for the majority, Justice Kagan rejected the government’s argument that grabbing only a short window of location data falls outside constitutional scrutiny, and dismissed as ‘meritless’ the claim that users voluntarily surrender this data. The court noted that Google repeatedly nudges users to enable location history — sometimes warning the device won’t ‘work correctly’ otherwise — without disclosing how often or how precisely their movements are logged, or that the records could end up with police.

The case stemmed from a Richmond, Virginia bank robbery in which police used a geofence warrant to identify Okello Chatrie, who had opted into Google’s location history feature and was later sentenced to 12 years. Geofence warrants let law enforcement compel tech companies to hand over data on everyone inside a virtual perimeter during a set timeframe, a tactic critics call a dragnet. Google itself has conceded the searches frequently sweep in thousands of innocent people near homes, places of worship, clinics, and other sensitive sites for which there is no probable cause.

The ruling is the court’s first major Fourth Amendment location-privacy decision since Carpenter in 2018, and it extends that precedent into the geofence era. Notably, the justices did not throw out the technique entirely: the appeals court will still decide whether this particular warrant was ‘reasonable’ — described with sufficient particularity and backed by probable cause. Privacy advocates framed the outcome as a check on turning commercial location tracking into a state surveillance tool, while law enforcement maintains the warrants are essential for chasing down leads that otherwise dead-end.