Current Month (June 2026)
Cell Phone Location Data/History Warrant Request: Is It a Fourth Amendment Search?
By Alan S. Wernick, Esq., Wernick & Associates, LTD.
Cell phone location data and location history are usually turned on by most cell phone users. In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Court considered how the Fourth Amendment applies to a geofence warrant requesting cell site location information (“CSLI,” i.e., cell phone location data and location history).
In Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112, 2026 U.S. LEXIS 2878 (U.S. June 29, 2026)), local police in Virginia were trying to solve a crime involving a man robbing a credit union. As described in the syllabus, the police “learned from witness interviews and surveillance footage that the robber had approached the credit union from a corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but they could not find out anything more, and the robber remained at large.” Id. at *1. The police applied to the local court for a geofence warrant directed to Google requesting CSLI within a certain radius of the credit union (the geofence) that Google collects through its Location History service. Based on a three-step process narrowing down anonymized data for all cell phones within the geofence in a time period to a final list for which Google turned over identifying information, the federal government charged Okello Chatrie, one of the individuals identified through that process and the petitioner in the case, with committing the crime.
The Court was asked to consider whether the Fourth Amendment applied to (1) the use of a geofence warrant as described in the Court’s decision and, if so, (2) whether the search was reasonable given the features of the warrant they employed. The Court answered the first part of the question by holding that the police conducted a search when they gained access to Location History data, stating, “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.” Id. at *11. For the second part of the question (whether the search was reasonable given the warrant issued), the Court remanded to the Court of Appeals to determine whether the warrant issued and each of its steps were properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause.
The bottom line is that the Fourth Amendment protects “against unjustified governmental intrusion on the privacy of the individual.” Id. at *52. However, the individual cell phone owner should read the fine print of agreements pertaining to cell phone location data and location history and knowingly exercise their freedom to choose whether to turn on or off that (and any other) cell phone functionality.
For more information, see Business Law Today’s forthcoming full-length article on this subject.
