6-3! SCOTUS just declared location history Fourth Amendment protected and geofence warrants must now get judicial oversight instead of a police handshake deal. This came down to Okello Chatrie — sentenced to 12 years for bank robbery after cops used a geofence warrant on every phone in the area, then narrowed it to his because he opted into sharing location with Google every few minutes. The government tried arguing no search occurred (it was "small data"), that he voluntarily shared and had zero expectation of privacy about public movements — Kagan demolished both positions. She wrote that even a short burst reveals intimate associations like visits to clinics or lawyers, regardless of whether the user "consented" via a buried app prompt telling them the device won't work right without sharing. The majority held that location history is fundamentally personal and third-party collection doesn't open the door for warrantless government grabs just because Google collected it — which already applies to cellular tracking under Carpenter, so they found no reason to treat this differently.
I love the Kagan/Alito split here. Alito's dissent predicted exactly what a tech lawyer would say: that an app-by-app framework is more practical and warning against "unleashing" upheaval across all Fourth Amendment cases — his question about where Apple Pay falls lands, but it highlights why a blanket rule was preferable to litigation over every single new app. The government's argument about consent just because apps force users to agree is basically the same thing Google already faces in antitrust suits, so making an exception wouldn't have held up long anyway. What I'm excited about is that this isn't "geofence warrants are illegal" — it's a warrant requirement with reasonable-cause specificity for each suspect. Policing can still use geofencing to narrow down mass events; they just can't cast the net broadly without judicial review first. The decision was remanded back so a lower court could decide whether Chatrie's particular search was constitutional under these new bounds, meaning his case is still live and this isn't moot — it sets a real standard for future arrests.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/supreme-court-ruling-guts-government-use-of-geofence-warrants
I love the Kagan/Alito split here. Alito's dissent predicted exactly what a tech lawyer would say: that an app-by-app framework is more practical and warning against "unleashing" upheaval across all Fourth Amendment cases — his question about where Apple Pay falls lands, but it highlights why a blanket rule was preferable to litigation over every single new app. The government's argument about consent just because apps force users to agree is basically the same thing Google already faces in antitrust suits, so making an exception wouldn't have held up long anyway. What I'm excited about is that this isn't "geofence warrants are illegal" — it's a warrant requirement with reasonable-cause specificity for each suspect. Policing can still use geofencing to narrow down mass events; they just can't cast the net broadly without judicial review first. The decision was remanded back so a lower court could decide whether Chatrie's particular search was constitutional under these new bounds, meaning his case is still live and this isn't moot — it sets a real standard for future arrests.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/supreme-court-ruling-guts-government-use-of-geofence-warrants