alt Hacker NewsUS Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
Comments
The implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant.
The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.
I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified.
- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails
- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels
- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels
- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?
It's such a little thing but while reading the opinion I see that the court (Kagan in this case?) makes a factual claim it provides SOURCES.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
"Modern cell phones, we observed a dozen years ago, are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373, 385 (2014). Since then, the percentage of Americans who own smartphones has only increased. To- day, more than nine in ten Americans own a smartphone. See W. Bishop, Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 20, 2025) (91%); compare A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013) (56%)."
Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.
PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
What is often overloked is how much location data leaks through photo metadata alone. Every photo taken with a phone contains GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device info in the EXIF data. People share photos publicly without realizing they are broadcasting their exact location history. At least with geofence warrants there is a legal process, with photo metadata it is just frely available to anyone who checks.
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
So surveillance tech works. That isn't a question, it is a statement. In a perfect world only bad people would have it applied to them. The issue is that it is too easy now. When wire tapping became a thing it was a physical thing that had time and effort costs. Abuse of it was capped by capability to do it and that bar made it, to me, a reasonable compromise that a judge would need to issue a warrant and that the police would need to expend real, finite, resources to execute it. Without boundaries any surveillance tech is to dangerous to have. Maybe we need quotas? You can only request and monitor x# of people a month where x is a small number related to population size. We need to find ways to limit overreach of technology capabilities. I am glad this was decided this way but I really want a more concrete tool that limits all technologies like this.
Any warrant must be extremely specific and limit the scope as far as possible.
Warrants 99% of the time are rubber stamped and issued for either something non-existent or very flimsy evidence and needs to be stopped in its tracks.
good. Of course the precise language of the ruling matters, but good.
IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
Excellent, I wonder how this might impact things like this:
Great... now do flock cameras, license plate trackers, basically everything in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980
This is an interesting configuration of justices
Obviously there should be limits but what should they be?
I actually don’t think asking for phone ids for 30min before and after an event within a limited distance IS overly broad. The fact it only returned 19 initial IDs kind of shows that no?
Equally, knowing someone has been in or near a bank is not particularly intrusive. It’s not like searching who visited a lawyers office or a sexual health clinic etc.
So would a 5 min window have been ok? Or a 10minute window?
When does a warrant become “sprawling”?
In case you were wondering
This ruling was unusually bipartisan because some justices didn’t like that they were hearing a case at all that shouldn’t affect the case at all.
What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?
IMHO a more important ruling "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power":
> More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.
* https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724538
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
AIUI, independent agencies created by Congress are no longer independent.
There are actual cases of false murder accusations occurring simply because the wrongly accused person simply happened to be within X number of meters of the crime scene. They simply walked past the wrong place at the wrong time with their phone.
This is partly why I use GrapheneOS.
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.
PR stunt. They already have raw access to everything anyway.
Y'all celebrating this like a win, but it's just rubber stamp of dragnets with a few extra steps. Supreme Court could have ruled that geofencing itself was unconstitutional. They did not. Instead:
>In this case, she said, Chatrie and the government have disputed – and the court of appeals did not decide – whether the geofence warrant provided the kind of “‘particularized information’ … based on ‘probable cause to believe that Google had information’ that would help solve a crime.” Therefore, the court sent the case back to the lower court for it to make that determination.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
"armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty."
I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0
rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
[dead]
[flagged]
From https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
Additional details:
> The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.
> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.
> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
Link to ruling:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf