In May 2019, someone robbed a bank in Midlothian, Virginia. A detective got a warrant — not for a suspect’s phone, but for every phone within a 17½-acre zone around the bank over a two-hour window. Google was ordered to search its database and identify every device in that area: bank customers, church congregants, people in nearby homes, anyone passing through.
That’s a geofence warrant. And the US Supreme Court is now deciding whether it’s constitutional.
Search First, Suspect Later
The case is Chatrie v. United States. Okello Chatrie was convicted of the robbery after police used the geofence data to narrow their focus to his device. He received more than 11 years in prison. But the constitutional question isn’t about his guilt — it’s about the method.
Traditional warrants require probable cause to search a specific person or place. Geofence warrants flip that logic. Police define a geographic area and a time window, then demand that a tech company identify everyone who was there. It’s search first, develop suspicions later.
Between 2021 and 2023, geofence warrants made up more than 25% of all warrants Google received from US law enforcement. In 2019 alone, Google received 9,000 of these requests — and most remain sealed from public view.
The Justices Are Split
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 27, 2026, and the bench was divided.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut to the core of the consent argument. The government claimed Chatrie had “voluntarily disclosed” his location to Google. Sotomayor’s response: “If this is consent, that means the government can seek those documents for any reason, not just the commission of a crime, or no reason, correct?”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed further on scope: “You really are saying that you could track someone going inside a home — about movements inside a home, movements to the bathroom, movements to the bedroom, all of that?”
On the other side, Justice Samuel Alito was more sympathetic to the government’s position, noting that Chatrie “voluntarily disclosed to Google the information about where he was going to be.” Chief Justice John Roberts suggested the issue was simpler than it appeared: “If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off.”
That argument — that privacy is a setting you toggle — misses how modern phones actually work. Location data collection is baked into operating systems, app permissions, and default settings that most people never change or fully understand.
A Circuit Split the Court Must Resolve
Lower courts have reached opposite conclusions. The Fourth Circuit ruled in 2024 that collecting geofence data isn’t even a “search” under the Fourth Amendment — meaning no constitutional protections apply. The Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion that same year, calling geofence warrants “modern-day general warrants” that are flatly unconstitutional.
General warrants — open-ended government orders to search wherever officials wished — are exactly what the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit. The American colonists who drafted it had lived under British writs of assistance that let customs officers search any home, ship, or warehouse without specifying what they were looking for. The question is whether a digital dragnet of every phone in a neighbourhood is meaningfully different.
Google Stepped Back. Others Haven’t.
Google moved location data storage to users’ devices in 2023 and stopped responding to geofence warrants entirely last year. But other companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Uber, and Snap among them — still collect and store location data on their servers. A Supreme Court ruling that permits geofence warrants would create ongoing pressure on every company that holds location data to comply with these requests.
The technique has also gone beyond solving robberies. Geofence warrants have been used to identify people present at protests, and privacy advocates have documented cases of innocent bystanders being investigated solely because their phone was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Why This Matters
A decision is expected by the end of June 2026, and it will set the rules for digital privacy in the United States for a generation.
If the Court upholds geofence warrants, the precedent extends far beyond location data. The same logic — that data you “voluntarily” share with a tech company carries no privacy expectation — could apply to search histories, email metadata, cloud storage access logs, or any data that flows through a third-party server. Every cloud service becomes a potential surveillance access point.
If the Court strikes them down or imposes strict limits, it would reinforce the principle from Carpenter v. United States (2018) that digital-age surveillance requires digital-age privacy protections — and that the sheer volume and granularity of data that tech companies collect creates privacy interests that the government can’t simply bypass through a corporate intermediary.
Either way, the ruling underscores something practical: the less location data your devices and services collect and store, the less there is for anyone to demand. Services that minimise data collection, store data on your device rather than their servers, and operate under jurisdictions with strong privacy protections aren’t just a preference — they’re a defence.