The US Supreme Court extends the Fourth Amendment to location history held by third parties: law enforcement access now requires prior judicial authorisation.
In a six-to-three ruling, the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment protects a user’s location history stored by third parties such as Google. The decision, published on 29 June 2026, arises from the case United States v. Chatrie: police had used a geofence warrant to obtain from Google a list of every phone present in the area of an armed robbery, then narrowed that list until they arrested Okello Chatrie, who was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
The government had argued that the search was too limited to trigger constitutional protections, and that Chatrie – having voluntarily shared his location with Google every few minutes – had forfeited any reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, rejected both arguments: the volume of data obtained is irrelevant, because anyone who carries a smartphone accepts location features to make apps work, often without knowing how frequently data is recorded or how it may be transmitted to authorities. As the ruling states, “a cell phone user should not be treated as if they are sharing private information with third parties – to then be freely passed along to the government – simply because they do the ordinary things that cell phone users do.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her concurrence that even short-term surveillance can reveal “a wealth of detail about familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations” – especially if a person was present in sensitive locations such as a law office, a clinic, or a nightclub. It is evidence that location surveillance is worth far more than a simple record of movement: it is a map of identity.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation welcomed the ruling, while noting that it does not declare geofence warrants unconstitutional in absolute terms. Anyone carrying a phone in their pocket should nonetheless be able to keep their life shielded from state surveillance.
