The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they used a geofence warrant to obtain Google location records in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery case, according to SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe.
The 6-3 decision sends Okello Chatrie’s case back to a lower court, which must decide whether the search was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. That distinction matters: the justices did not say every geofence warrant is invalid, but they did say this kind of demand reaches a constitutionally protected privacy interest.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority that a person has “a reasonable expectation of privacy” in records showing where their phone has been, and that police intrude on that interest when they demand those records from a third-party technology company, even for a narrow period.
The case, Chatrie v. United States, grew out of a robbery at a federal credit union outside Richmond, Virginia. Howe reported that an armed man entered the credit union, handed a teller a note demanding money, and left with nearly $200,000. Investigators lacked leads until they served Google with a warrant seeking location data for phones near the bank during the relevant window.
How the warrant worked
A geofence warrant reverses the usual target-first model. Rather than asking for data about a named suspect, investigators define a place and time, then ask a company to identify devices that were there. In this case, the company was Google, because Google held location data that could be searched that way.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed to the technical reason: Google’s Location History feature stored users’ location records in the cloud, tied to Google accounts, and those records powered the Timeline feature in Google Maps. Gruber described the data as unencrypted while held by Google, which meant Google could produce it in response to legal demands.
That storage model has since changed. Google announced in December 2023 that Location History would default to on-device storage, with end-to-end encryption for location data backed up online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had pushed for that change, said at the time that the move would help end geofence warrants by removing Google’s ability to search and hand over those records in bulk.
Apple’s position was different, according to the company’s government transparency report for the first half of 2022. Apple said it may receive geofence requests from government agencies, but “does not have any data to provide” in response to them. Gruber also reported that an Apple source said the company believes it has not stored geolocation data in a way that can be linked to groups of people in a given area.
One caveat remains for iPhone users: Google apps can request location permissions on iOS. Gruber said he suspected, but did not know, that iPhone users who gave Google Maps always-on location access may have been exposed to the same kind of Google-held location searches as Android users.
The ruling still has reach beyond Google’s old data pipeline. If companies hold searchable, personally identifiable location records, Monday’s decision gives courts a Supreme Court marker: asking for those records by place and time is a search, not administrative housekeeping with better maps.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
