US supreme court hears whether smartphone location data warrants infringe users’ privacy

A drone photo shows the image of a bank robbed by Okello Chatrie in 2019 in Virginia. Photograph: Steve Helber/APView image in fullscreenA drone photo shows the image of a bank robbed by Okello Chatrie in 2019 in Virginia. Photograph: Steve Helber/APTechnologyUS supreme court hears whether smartphone location data warrants infringe users’ privacyLawyer for DoJ argued actions taken in public while in possession of a smartphone afforded no expectation of privacySanya MansoorMon 27 Apr 2026 18.28 EDTLast modified on Mon 27 Apr 2026 18.47 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThe US supreme court is considering whether sprawling warrants for smartphone location data infringe on Americans’ privacy rights and violate the constitution.Justices heard opening arguments in Chatrie v United States on Monday that concerned law enforcement’s reliance on so-called “geofence warrants” in difficult cases. The case was originally brought by Okello Chatrie, whose phone location data helped police in Richmond, Virginia, track him down after he robbed a bank at gunpoint and escaped with $195,000 in 2019. Chatrie pleaded guilty to armed robbery and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but his lawyers argue none of the evidence against him should have been admissible in court.A lawyer for the US Department of Justice argued that nearly any actions taken in public while in possession of a smartphone afforded no expectation of privacy.“An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see, that he has opted to allow a third party to analyze for its own purposes,” the US solicitor general, a high-ranking lawyer for Donald Trump’s administration, has argued in legal filings.Law enforcement is increasingly demanding that tech companies hand over sensitive phone location data on people at or near a site where a suspected crime occurred – anyone who falls within the radius of a virtual “fence”. These geofence warrants, rather than specifying their targets, instead compel tech companies to hand over data to police or the FBI on every electronic device in a particular place at a given time.Privacy advocates and some legal experts view geofence searches as a dragnet that sweeps up innocent bystanders. “Just because you have a cell phone, should you be subjected to all sorts of law enforcement investigations because of crimes that may have happened in your vicinity?” said Paul Ohm, a law professor at Georgetown University, who submitted an amicus brief in the case. These warrants can lead to an individual’s phone location data being shared with the police simply because they “were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even worse – you weren’t, but your phone thought you were”, Ohm added.Law enforcement officers and prosecutors say these geofence warrants help them solve crimes after reaching dead ends. Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concerns about “the practical consequences of not being able to solve murders”.Chatrie had turned on an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. The government noted in its legal filings that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the location history service”; Chatrie’s lawyers noted in theirs that this amounted to more than 500 million Google users.After officers interviewed witnesses at the bank Chatrie robbed and reviewed security footage, they had no leads. In a geofence warrant request, law enforcement…

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