Supreme Court to decide if police cellphone location warrants are constitutional

The US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether it’s constitutional for police to sweep up cellphone location data under broad search warrants.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that a search warrant is generally required to obtain location data from service providers. These warrants seek location data on every person within a defined area over a set period of time and are meant to help police identify potential suspects or witnesses.

Geofence warrants have been widely challenged in lower courts. Critics argue that they can lead to innocent people being tied to investigations they have no relation to.

The high court has recently been considering at least two related appeals. In one case, police used that data to arrest Okello Chatrie in the 2019 robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian – he was convicted of armed robbery and received about 12 years in prison.

When reviewing security camera footage, officers noticed that the suspect was using his phone before the robbery. They then served a geofence warrant on Google to collect location data for every device close to the bank within an hour of the robbery.

Chatrie’s lawyers, though, argued that the warrant violated his privacy and was used to gather the location history of people close to the bank, even though the officers had no knowledge whether those people were in any way involved in the robbery.

Prosecutors claimed that because Chatrie opted into Google’s Location History, he had no expectation of privacy.

Although a federal judge agreed that the warrant was a violation of Chatrie’s rights, the evidence was still allowed to be used in court because the officer who obtained it believed he was acting properly.

Have thoughts about this topic? Others do, too. Join them in the discussion.

Google has recently changed its data storage policy to make it harder for authorities to access users’ location history data through geofence warrants. A large share of these warrants is served to Google, which runs Google Maps, the world’s largest mapping platform.

US states and major cities are trying to navigate privacy laws and rapidly advancing technology. In May 2025, it was revealed that New Orleans police scanned live feeds of city streets for years and secretly used facial recognition technology to identify suspects in real time.

However, the accuracy of such technology is up for debate and is still improving. Earlier data from the Met and South Wales revealed a very high rate of inaccuracies (85%), adding that over 3,000 people have been wrongly identified by police facial recognition in the UK.