The US Supreme Court on Monday limited law enforcement’s use of “geofence” search warrants, in a major legal decision that is likely to have broad implications for privacy rights and law enforcement across the United States.
At 6-3 p.mulingthe US supreme court has said that “a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information.” According to the court, this means that people have privacy rights regarding the location history collected from their phones, as well as the services and apps running on them.
Because of this, the court ruled that authorities must obtain a search warrant when asking tech companies like Google for their users’ location data, even when requesting historical geo-infringement location data.
In part, the Supreme Court argued that authorities must obtain a search warrant to obtain geo-protected location data because a user does not willingly share their location data with a company like Google simply by using its services. If so, then the “third party doctrine,” which generally says that people have no expectation of privacy when it comes to data they willingly share with others, would apply. In these cases, authorities do not need a search warrant to obtain user data from telecommunications providers, for example.
Geofence warrants allow law enforcement to compel tech companies to hand over information about where their millions or billions of users were at a specific point in time, based on a record of their phone’s location stored in their databases. In practice, police will draw a diagram over a map and ask a judge to allow them to demand that tech companies such as Google search their vast databases of user locations and tell them which of their users were there at the time of the search.
Critics have argued that these often-called “reverse” search warrants are unconstitutional because they are inherently overbroad and include data on innocent people.
The court seemed to agree, but stopped short of outright banning the use of geographic crime warrants, allowing police to limit their requests for data when seeking a search warrant.
In other words, the Supreme Court simply ruled that the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and effectively protects privacy rights, applies to location data collected by companies like Google from their users’ cell phones. The ruling does not prevent law enforcement from obtaining historical cell phone location data, it merely ruled that authorities must obtain a search warrant when they request geo-infringement location information and show probable cause that the target may have committed a crime.
The decision centers on a case brought by Chatrie v. United Stateswho accused the government of using evidence during his bank robbery trial gathered under an unconstitutional search warrant. Okello Chatrie’s lawyers argued that the geofence warrants allow investigators to “search first and develop suspicions later” and violate long-standing rules on how government authorities seek to search or seize data from companies.
Authorities typically must establish “probable cause” linking a person to a crime to justify a search warrant, while critics argue that geospatial warrants work in reverse.
The Supreme Court took up the case after several legal cases involving geographic crime warrants, including Chatrie, split the courts in the United States, including at the appellate level.
It was not immediately clear how the ruling would affect previous court cases. A spokesman for the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The ruling was not expected to change Chatri’s sentence in his case, as previous courts have ruled that evidence obtained by the geo-attack warrant was collected in good faith. Chatrie’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.
The Supreme Court ruled that it was now up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether the search warrant sought in the Chatrie case showed probable cause and was therefore valid.
Some companies frequently targeted for location data requests, such as Google, have begun storing user location data on their devices rather than their servers to stop handing over user data, prompting researchers to go to the users themselves. Other companies that store location data, such as Microsoft, Uber and Yahoo, also receive geofence warrants on a regular basis.
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