Supreme Court Reinforces Privacy Protections for Precise Location Data
What You Need To Know
- The U.S. Supreme Court held 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it compels a provider like Google to produce a user’s location data using a “geofence” warrant, even if the request covers only a short period and the data is held by a third-party technology company.
- The decision builds on the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States and extends that reasoning to Google’s Location History, which the Court described as far more revealing than cell-site location information (CSLI) given its ability to pinpoint users within roughly 20 meters and logging location approximately every two minutes.
- The majority did not decide whether the geofence warrant at issue was valid. Instead, it remanded for the lower court to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity at each of the warrant’s three stages.
- Chatrie reinforces existing law and has immediate implications for how technology companies evaluate and respond to government demands for user location data and other sensitive requests affecting multiple users.
- Companies should consider whether their existing data production and law enforcement response protocols adequately address the heightened constitutional protections that Chatrie extends to location data and likely a variety of similarly sensitive records.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Chatrie v. United States upholds privacy protections for individuals’ sensitive data and builds directly on Carpenter v. United States (2018), in which the Court held that the government must obtain a warrant before compelling a wireless carrier to disclose more than a week’s worth of historical CSLI. The court reasoned that CSLI provides a detailed, retrospective record of a person’s movements and that users do not lose Fourth Amendment protection simply because the data is held by a third party.
Chatrie takes that reasoning a step further. It applies Carpenter to Google Location History, which the Court described as even more precise and revealing than CSLI, and it rejects the argument that the Fourth Amendment falls away simply because the government seeks only a relatively short period of data.
Background
The Chatrie case arose from a 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Unable to identify a suspect, investigators sought a “geofence” warrant, requiring Google to identify devices within a 150-meter radius of the credit union during a one-hour window surrounding the robbery. Geofence warrants typically proceed in three steps to progressively narrow an initially broad pool of location data. First, Google produced anonymized location data for all devices within the geofence. Second, investigators narrowed the list and requested additional movement data for selected devices, including movement outside the geofence. Third, investigators obtained identifying account information for the remaining users.
That process led investigators to petitioner Okello Chatrie, who moved to suppress the Google data. The Supreme Court granted review on the threshold question of whether obtaining the data through this process constituted a Fourth Amendment search.
The Court’s Decision
The Court held that obtaining data through the geofence method did constitute a Fourth Amendment search. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, concluded that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information, and that law enforcement invades that interest when it compels disclosure of Google Location History. The Court emphasized that Google Location History is highly revealing because it can log a user’s location every two minutes, place the user within roughly 20 meters, and in some cases estimate elevation, making it even more sensitive than the CSLI at issue in Carpenter.
The Court rejected two government arguments. First, it rejected the argument that no search occurred because the government sought only a short window of data (here, roughly two hours), explaining that even a brief slice of location data may reveal sensitive information about a person’s movements and associations. Second, echoing Carpenter, it rejected the argument that the privacy interest was defeated because Google held the data, declining to apply the third-party doctrine mechanically to highly revealing location records generated through ordinary smartphone use.
The Court did not decide whether the geofence warrant in this case was itself valid. It remanded for the lower court to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements at each stage of the process.
Implications and Practical Takeaways for Technology Companies
For technology companies, Chatrie is significant both for what it says about provider-held location data and for what it suggests about a broader range of government demands for sensitive digital records. At a minimum, the decision strengthens the position that detailed location data held by a provider is not an ordinary business record available on minimal process. Such data may be constitutionally protected, even when held by a third party and even when the request is limited in duration.
More broadly, the Court’s reasoning may be invoked in disputes involving other categories of provider-held data that reveal movement, behavior, patterns, routines, or presence at sensitive places. The opinion reflects skepticism toward characterizing as ordinary business records digital data that are highly revealing of the activities of private individuals, and it underscores the constitutional concerns raised by retrospective, scalable investigative tools that allow law enforcement to identify unknown individuals by querying large stores of provider-held data.
In practical terms, providers should consider Chatrie in deciding whether to resist, narrow, or seek clarification of demands regarding highly personalized data on individuals that may be too broad, insufficiently tailored, or unsupported by clear judicial authorization. That is especially true where the government seeks historical data that reveals location without a warrant, uses a multistep or reverse-targeting process, or seeks information that would sweep in large numbers of non-suspect users before identifying an actual suspect.
In light of Chatrie, companies may wish to:
- Require heightened review for requests seeking location or movement data. Historical location trails, app-based movement data, telemetry, and similar records may warrant heightened review even where the government proceeds on subpoena, court order, or other lesser process.
- Evaluate scope and tailoring carefully. Providers should evaluate whether legal process is appropriately limited as to timeframe, geography, user population, and categories of data sought.
- Scrutinize iterative or multistep legal processes. Where the government proposes a narrowing process over time, providers should consider whether later stages are meaningfully constrained by judicial authorization or instead leave too much discretion to investigators.
- Account for the impact on non-suspect users. Requests that sweep in data concerning bystanders, residents, employees, customers, congregants, or other innocent users may present heightened legal and reputational risk.
- Review escalation procedures for novel or high-risk requests. Reverse-targeting demands or sweeps that could capture large numbers of users should trigger escalated review by legal, privacy, trust-and-safety, and compliance personnel.
- Maintain current technical documentation for sensitive datasets. As Chatrie illustrates, the legal analysis may turn in part on how a product works in practice, including how often data is collected, how precise it is, where it is stored, and what users are told about how the provider accesses and uses it.
Providers should revisit form objections, warrant requirements, internal escalation triggers, and procedures for challenging or narrowing overbroad legal processes.