You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States.
The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devices of people who happen to be in the vicinity of a crime. EFF had joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in filing an amicus brief in the case.
The decision in Chatrie is important: it is the first digital surveillance decision by the Court since its landmark 2018 ruling Carpenter v. United States, which involved prolonged tracking of people’s movements using cell phone location data. The new case expands that ruling by confirming that even shorter-term surveillance of location data can constitute a search because it can still reveal “private matters,” including a wealth of detail about a person’s familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.
Geofence warrants don’t name a suspect or a specific individual or device the way typical warrants do. Instead, they compel companies—almost always Google—to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period. This creates a high risk of suspicion falling on innocent people and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past.
In Chatrie, a 2019 geofence warrant compelled Google to search the accounts of all its hundreds of millions of users to see if any one of them was within a radius police drew around a Northern Virginia crime scene. A federal district court in Virginia in 2022 held that the geofence warrant plainly violated the Fourth Amendment, and a 2024 federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling later held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”
Google in 2023 announced changes to how it stores location data, with the effect of eventually making it impossible for the company to respond to geofence warrants. Since July 2025, mass geofence searches of Google users’ location data have not been possible. However, Google is not the only company collecting location data, nor the only way for police to access mass amounts of data on people with no connection to a crime—data brokers collect and aggregate location data from many different apps on our phones and provide that data to police.
Chatrie could have wide-ranging implications beyond location data as well. The Supreme Court affirmed that app data is subject to the Fourth Amendment, because users “reasonably view” it as their own and reasonably expect it to be shielded from the government. Justice Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring in the judgment, called location data a user’s “personal property,” no different from myriad other “effects” explicitly protected by the text of the Fourth Amendment.
Regardless of how the Fourth Circuit rules on remand, this Chatrie opinion will shape how lower courts address police access to location and other data going forward.
This article was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Republished under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Read the original article: https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/victory-supreme-court-says-constitution-protects-peoples-location-data.
