PRESS RELEASE: EPIC Celebrates Supreme Court’s Opinion in Consequential Geofencing Case

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court ruled today that geofence searches violate a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. The case, which involved a controversial law enforcement technique used to identify individuals near a specific location using their cell phone location information, will return to the lower courts to determine whether the geofence warrant issued to Google in this case provided sufficient protection.

In an opinion from Justice Kagan in Chatrie v. United States, the court held that law enforcement conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell phone location information. This means that law enforcement must obtain a warrant before conducting a geofence search. Further consideration in the lower courts will specify what that warrant must include in order to be constitutional.

EPIC applauds the Supreme Court’s recognition that warrantless geofence searches are fundamentally incompatible with the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

By holding that the government cannot use broad location data dragnets to identify suspects without obtaining a valid warrant, the Court has affirmed that our constitutional protections apply with full force in the digital age. This ruling helps ensure that the highly sensitive location records generated by our phones cannot be accessed through unreasonable searches that expose the movements of countless innocent people.

Policymakers now have the opportunity to establish clear protections and guardrails consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information.

As technology’s surveillance capabilities continue to expand, today’s decision preserves a basic principle of a free society: people should not have to sacrifice their privacy simply to participate in modern life.

In March, EPIC wrote an amicus brief for the case on behalf of Law & Technology and Fourth Amendment scholars, in which we argued that the Court should affirm that the Constitution protects cell phone location data and does not allow the government to conduct broad searches for all devices in an area without particularized suspicion.

Chatrie stems from the criminal prosecution of Virginia man, Okello Chatrie, who contends that the government violated his Fourth Amendment rights by conducting a geofence search that led to his eventual conviction for a 2019 bank robbery.

During their investigation into a bank robbery, law enforcement officials sought a geofence warrant ordering Google to identify all devices that were within a 300-meter diameter of the bank within the hour of the crime and then catalogued everywhere those devices went for a total of two hours. Google produced information about nineteen users whose devices were initially identified in the geofence, and the government ultimately obtained account information about three Google users.

EPIC’s amicus brief explained that the specific geofence warrant in this case, and likely others, is unconstitutional because it leaves far too much discretion to law enforcement. Warrants need to be backed by a court finding of particularized probable cause for the places and people searched, but in many cases involving geofence searches, the judge only finds probable cause that a likely crime occurred at a particular location and time. This allows law enforcement to track many innocent people and force Google to identify them without further judicial process.

The Law & Technology Scholars brief that EPIC filed analyzed the question of voluntariness, explaining why users should not be understood to waive their Fourth Amendment rights when apps require or strongly urge users to provide their permission to collect their location data.

The Supreme Court has now affirmed what EPIC has long asserted: that individuals have a significant privacy interest in their precise location data. Policymakers must now act to establish privacy rules that reflect this interest and limit unlawful access of location data.

“Today’s opinion is one of this Court’s most important decisions on privacy in years. The Court rightly reaffirmed that the Constitution places real limits on the government’s ability to exploit the vast amounts of data generated by the devices we use every day to track us.”said Alan Butler, EPIC Executive Director and President

EPIC has also released a statement regarding the Court’s other ruling, Trump v. Slaughter, in which the court ruled that Congress can’t protect heads of most independent agencies from being fired by the President without cause.

Please contact [email protected] with requests for further comment. 

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The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) was established in 1994 to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age. Our mission is to secure the fundamental right to privacy in the digital age for all people through advocacy, research, and litigation.