WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling Monday, determining that constitutional privacy rights extend to the location data generated by cellphones — a decision stemming from the case of a bank robber who was tracked down using a geofence warrant.
Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Elena Kagan said that people do not surrender their expectation of privacy simply by opting into Google’s location history feature.
“A cellphone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties — which then can be freely passed on to the government — just by doing the ordinary things cellphone users do,” Kagan wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito authored a dissenting opinion, arguing that the defendant, Okello Chatrie, had no reasonable expectation of privacy over information he chose to share with Google.
The ruling represents the court’s continued effort to apply a constitutional amendment ratified in 1791 to modern technologies that the nation’s founders could never have anticipated.
The case began after a bank robbery in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia. Investigators obtained a geofence warrant following the May 2019 robbery, using it to identify cellphones that had been in the vicinity of the bank when the crime occurred.
One of those devices was traced back to Chatrie, who had managed to avoid detection until authorities employed the location-tracking tool.
The warrant set the investigation in motion. After placing Chatrie near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian at the time of the robbery, police secured a search warrant for his residence. Inside, they discovered nearly $100,000 in cash — including bills still wrapped in bands bearing the signature of the bank teller.
Chatrie later pleaded guilty to the robbery and received a sentence of nearly 12 years behind bars. His legal team appealed, arguing that all evidence gathered should have been thrown out.
Defense attorneys challenged the geofence warrant as an invasion of privacy, noting it allowed investigators to collect location data from people in the area without any specific reason to suspect them in the crime. Prosecutors countered that Chatrie had no privacy claim because he had voluntarily enabled Google’s location history on his device.
The Supreme Court stopped short of ruling Monday on whether the search itself violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Instead, the justices sent the case back to a lower court for additional proceedings.
A federal judge had previously found that the search violated Chatrie’s rights but still permitted the evidence to be used, reasoning that the officer who applied for the warrant had acted in good faith. The federal appeals court based in Richmond upheld the conviction in a divided ruling.
In a separate but related case, a federal appeals court in New Orleans concluded that geofence warrants “are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”
