Supreme Court just made it harder for authorities to get location data from Google and Apple

Tech companies can hand users' location data to authorities, but the Supreme Court now requires authorities to take a different route when dealing with a suspectless crime.

The US Supreme Court ruled that authorities must have probable cause before asking tech companies like Google and Apple for users' location data.

Officers are no longer able to frivolously file court orders compelling companies to hand over users’ location data, known as “geofence warrants.”

While law enforcement requests information from tech companies all the time, the difference between specific, warranted requests and “geofence warrants” is that the tech company is required to provide information on a larger pool of people.

In the past, law enforcement could order tech companies like Google and Apple to hand over the location data of anyone who was at a specific location around the time a crime was committed.

This means that people who weren’t suspected of the crime would have their location data ripped from tech companies for just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

How “geofence warrants” work

The case at the center of this ruling involved a bank robbery from 2019, where authorities requested that Google hand over anonymized location data within a geofence 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after the robbery, the ruling reads.

To narrow the search, authorities cast a wider net, asking Google to hand over the anonymous phone locations within the geofence for a two-hour period before and after the robbery.

Once the list was narrowed down, Google handed over identifying information, which included names and phone numbers of potential suspects.

“Geofence warrants” are typically used when a crime was committed, but police don’t have a suspect, so they draw a virtual perimeter around the scene and ask tech companies to hand over data about the phones in the area around the time of the crime.

While this returned positive results, as one person was charged and pleaded guilty to bank robbery, the court agreed 6 to 3 that warrants of this nature are deemed a “search.”

Police can no longer get Google, Apple data without a reason

A “search” is protected under the Fourth Amendment, which is designed to protect individuals in the US from “unreasonable searches and seizures” because law enforcement is intruding on an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

So, if a “geofence warrant” is considered a “search” in the eyes of the Supreme Court, this means that law enforcement is required to have a legitimate reason (otherwise known as probable cause) to request data on a large pool of people.

If law enforcement hasn’t established a suspect based on sufficient evidence, then “geofence warrants” cannot be issued freely.

While this won’t stop users from accessing location data from Google and Apple if they have probable cause, it does ensure, to an extent, that officers can’t access it without reasonable evidence.

However, “geofence warrants” can be used to track criminal gangs or associates working with a known criminal, but authorities still need to provide evidence of probable cause.

One Justice of the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, gave the opinion that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information, even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”

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