Supreme Court rules police need a proper warrant to pull your location from Google

Every time you turn on location services, Google logs where you went. Until last week, police in the United States could demand that data for every device that passed through a crime scene without needing to justify the breadth of the request under the Fourth Amendment. A 6-3 Supreme Court decision issued June 29 changed that.

The case involves Okello Chatrie, convicted of a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, partly on the strength of a geofence warrant. The technique works like this: law enforcement asks Google to hand over location histories of every phone within a set radius of a crime scene during a specific time window. In the Chatrie case that radius was 150 meters. From the pool of anonymous device IDs the search returned, officers narrowed their suspect list until a name emerged. American police departments have been filing these warrants for years, and until now faced almost no constitutional barrier.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the six-justice majority, held that individuals possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in their phone’s location records, and that police intrude on that protected interest when they demand the data — ‘even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.’ That phrase is the legal crux. The third-party doctrine had long held that data you share with a company loses constitutional protection because you voluntarily handed it over. The court rejected that logic for precise location histories. What you tell Google about where you go, the majority ruled, is still yours.

The decision builds directly on Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that brought cell-tower records under Fourth Amendment protection. Towers tell you which neighborhood someone was in. Google’s Sensorvault database, which sits behind geofence warrant requests, places a device within meters. The precision difference matters legally: the more granular the location record, the stronger the constitutional protection it carries.

The practical reach extends well beyond criminal cases. Civil liberties organizations have argued for years that geofence warrants can sweep up everyone who attended a protest, visited a reproductive health clinic, sought immigration legal help, or entered a place of worship — simply by being in the same geographic area at the same time. Constitutional protection of location histories makes those broad sweeps far harder to sustain. Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred with the majority through a different route, arguing that location data is personal property that carries its own Fourth Amendment protection regardless of who holds it.

Three justices disagreed. Samuel Alito, writing in dissent joined by Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, warned the ruling ‘will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine.’ The dissenters held that the third-party doctrine should control because Google, not Chatrie, retained the data.

One important limit: the ruling does not ban geofence warrants. Police can still file these requests — they simply have to justify the geographic scope and time window to a judge and satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirements for particularity and probable cause. Broad sweeps capturing hundreds of uninvolved people are now constitutionally vulnerable. Narrowly drawn, well-justified requests may survive the new threshold. The Chatrie case itself was sent back to lower courts to determine whether the specific warrant met the new standard, leaving Chatrie’s conviction in legal limbo rather than overturned.

Google has not commented on how the ruling will affect the volume of requests it receives. The company’s government transparency report, published annually, is expected to show changes in geofence demand patterns beginning with the 2026 edition as law enforcement adapts. In the meantime, the 26 states where geofence warrants were most commonly filed now face a substantially changed legal landscape.

Tags: Cybersecurity, Google, privacy, Elena Kagan, Fourth Amendment, geofence