“Geofence” inquiries reveal the dangerous blend of today’s technology and deference to law enforcement.
Seven years earlier, law enforcement in Midlothian, Virginia, attempted to pinpoint a bank thief by instructing Google to comb through the location-history data of over half a billion users. The query surfaced 19 devices present at or near the bank during the robbery, allowing investigators to narrow the suspects to three individuals, among them Okello Chatrie, who was ultimately found guilty.
Viewed one way, leveraging a geofence warrant in this manner could seem like prudent, capable policing; viewed another, an intrusive breach of privacy. On Monday, the Supreme Court examined the competing arguments in a case that exposes how two shaky legal doctrines threaten Fourth Amendment protections, at a moment when Americans routinely entrust vast amounts of personal data to tech firms that assist with countless everyday activities.
Back in 1967, the Court held that the Fourth Amendment applies solely where a person harbors a reasonable expectation of secrecy. In later rulings touching bank and telephone records, the Court concluded that such an expectation does not exist when individuals willingly turn over information to third parties for those entities’ commercial purposes.
These doctrines were called into question by a 2018 case involving the FBI following a robbery suspect through location data gathered from cellphone towers. While the majority ultimately concluded that such tracking typically requires a warrant, that ruling clashed with the third-party doctrine, a tension Justice Neil Gorsuch highlighted in his dissent.
Chatrie’s situation resembles the earlier one in broad strokes, with the distinction that his identity was inferred from data collected by his own device rather than from cell-site data. While Google reportedly no longer retains such data on its servers, numerous popular apps continue to monitor users’ locations, with that data frequently stored offsite.
Authorities did obtain a warrant in Chatrie’s case. However, his attorneys contend that the order is so expansive that it breaches the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for probable cause and for warrants to specify with particularity both the places to be searched and the people or items to be seized.
The administration under Trump sought to persuade the Court to dismiss that claim. It also argued that geofence inquiries do not necessitate a warrant, since individuals who consent to location tracking cannot plausibly expect their data to remain private.
Should that logic hold, warned Chatrie’s attorney Adam Unikowsky during Monday’s oral argument, the government could raid remotely stored emails, photos, calendars, and documents at will. Several justices reacted to this prospect with evident concern.
While Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin assured the Court that his position did not reach that extent, the other examples still rest on the premise that information was shared with third parties voluntarily, supposedly stripping the Fourth Amendment of protection. And even when restricted to location data, such information can expose intimate aspects of individuals’ lives.
“The scope for misuse is staggering,” Unikowsky states in a Supreme Court brief. “By simply drawing a geofence around places like a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, the government could force a search of all users’ records to identify attendees.”
Beyond asserting that individuals reasonably regard their location histories as private, Unikowsky also draws on Gorsuch’s 2018 reservations about both the reasonable-expectation and third-party rules. Since the Fourth Amendment guards ‘papers’ and ‘effects’ against unreasonable searches and seizures, Gorsuch argued, the critical inquiry is whether the information the government seeks qualifies as one of those protected items.
Gorsuch found it reasonable to contend that individuals retain a property-like stake in their records even after disclosing them to others for defined objectives. That line of reasoning, embraced by Unikowsky, appears to offer a viable route around the third-party doctrine — a risk heightened by contemporary technology beyond what the Fourth Amendment’s authors could have anticipated.
© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
