Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrants for Geofence Phone Location Data

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police must generally obtain a warrant to gather detailed location data tracked by smartphones, in a case tied to a “geofence warrant” used to identify a Virginia man in a 2019 bank robbery.

In Chatrie v. United States, the court held that law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant” to obtain evidence used to convict Okello Chatrie constituted a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes, voting 6-3.

ABC News

Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority that “Google users regularly employ Location History as a personal journal,” and that courts must guard against “undue encroachment” on Fourth Amendment rights.

The decision sent Chatrie’s case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the warrant was reasonable and properly tailored, while the Supreme Court did not resolve whether the underlying warrant was valid in his case.

Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito described the ruling as an “irresponsible escapade,” arguing the majority’s approach would destabilize Fourth Amendment doctrine.

Alito also said the decision would “send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine” but would ultimately not affect Chatrie’s case, while the majority emphasized that police intrude on a constitutionally protected interest when they demand location data from a third-party tech company.

AP News

Privacy-focused coverage highlighted that the court said “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information,” and that authorities need a search warrant when asking tech companies such as Google for location data.

Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the ruling was a “big deal” because it treated ordinary cellphone use as not forfeiting Fourth Amendment rights, and he said the court “remov[ed] brick by brick the foundation of this third-party doctrine.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling requires lower courts to assess whether the geofence warrant in Chatrie’s case was “reasonable,” including whether it was sufficiently narrowly tailored and supported by probable cause.

“The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday”

Ars Technica

The decision also left unresolved how far geofence warrants can go, with Bloomberg Law News noting the majority “declined to weigh in on the bounds of when such warrants are lawful or infringe on individuals’ constitutional rights.”

In the background of the case, the warrant process described by Bloomberg Law News involved Google providing location data in “three tranches,” including a list of 19 accounts within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery.

Bloomberg Law News further reported that Google said that as of July 2025 its location history data was either deleted or migrated away from company servers onto users’ devices, meaning it “can no longer comply with geofence warrants,” according to Google’s statement.