US Supreme Court limits geofence warrants

The US Supreme Court has limited how police can use “geofence” warrants, holding in a 6–3 decision that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell-phone location history even when that data sits with companies like Google, according to TechCrunch.

The practice at issue is built for scale. Investigators can draw a boundary on a map and demand location records for every device inside it at a given time, then work backwards to identify suspects. Critics have long argued that this turns the usual order of search warrants on its head: instead of demonstrating probable cause for a person, police gather a list of people and develop suspicions afterwards. The court agreed the method can sweep in large numbers of innocent users, but stopped short of banning geofence warrants outright.

What changes is the legal friction. The court said the so-called “third party doctrine” does not automatically erase privacy rights just because location data is held by an app or platform. That matters because location trails are not a single disclosure but a continuous record generated by the phone and the services running on it. Under the ruling, authorities can still seek historical location information, but they must obtain a warrant and narrow what they ask for when pursuing geofence data.

The decision arrives after lower courts split on whether geofence warrants fit within Fourth Amendment limits. It also lands in the middle of an institutional tug-of-war: police departments want broad, low-cost investigative tools; technology companies want to avoid being treated as a standing surveillance arm; and courts are left to write rules that fit a world where private services collect the most detailed movement logs by default. TechCrunch notes the case stems from Chatrie v. United States, where Okello Chatrie argued that evidence used in his bank robbery trial came from an unconstitutional geofence request.

The ruling may not change Chatrie’s own outcome because earlier courts found the government acted in “good faith,” but it sets a standard for the next request. The Supreme Court has sent the case back to the appeals court to assess whether the warrant in question was sufficiently valid under the new guidance.

For now, geofence warrants remain available—just no longer as a dragnet that can be justified after the fact.