Supreme Court Restricts Geofence Warrants

The Supreme Court on Monday limited law enforcement's use of "geofence warrants" that track suspects using cellphone location data from a broad swath of users, including people with no connection to a crime.

In a 6-3 decision, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that collection of location data through a geofence warrant implicates the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures—a setback for the federal government, which argued the warrants were a critical law enforcement tool that did not amount to a search at all.

The court found that broad geofence surveillance constitutes a search under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The court rejected the Trump administration's argument that no warrant is required at all. The ruling affects tens of thousands of criminal cases and hundreds of millions of smartphone users whose location data sits in tech company databases.

What Are Geofence Warrants?

A geofence warrant entails drawing a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed.

The government can then seek a warrant to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its users who were within the geofence at the time of the crime.

Geofence warrants allow law enforcement to force tech companies to hand over information about where any of its millions or billions of users were located at a particular place in time. In practice, police will draw a shape over a map and ask a judge to allow them to demand that tech companies, such as Google, search their vast banks of users' location data and tell them which of their users was there at the time of inquiry.

The technique has grown explosively. Google reported that it had received 982 such warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019, and 11,554 in 2020.

Between 2021 and 2023, geofence warrants made up over 25% of all warrants that Google received from law enforcement agencies in the United States.

The Virginia Bank Robbery Case

The case focused on a Virginia bank robbery, where a conviction rested in part on cellphone location information law enforcement received from Google through a so-called geofence warrant.

A man stole $195,000 from a bank, but after two months, the case had gone cold.

Law enforcement was able to track down the robber using a geofence warrant that included the location data for every cellphone within a 150-meter radius of the robbery.

Complying with the warrant, Google initially found the names of 19 people who were in or near the bank, but Google pushed back, ultimately providing the police with the names of just three people whose location data showed they were at the bank.

When police went to the home of one of them, they found a pistol matching one seen on security camera footage of the robbery and nearly $100,000 in cash. That man, Okello Chatrie, later confessed and was convicted of the crime.

Chatrie pleaded guilty to federal charges of armed robbery and brandishing a firearm, and he was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison.

Why the Court Said Location Data Deserves Protection

Justice Kagan wrote for the majority: "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."

Kagan concluded that location data—which she described as "a personal journal of a user's movements"—resembles other kinds of private materials such as emails, photographs or documents and should be "shielded from the 'inquisitive eyes' of the government."

Chatrie's attorneys argued in filings to the court that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow the government "to search first and develop suspicions later."

The geofence warrants in this case directed Google to search millions of users' location histories, meaning that millions of people were subjected to a search despite never having done anything suspicious.

The government had argued that users voluntarily share location data with companies like Google, placing it outside constitutional protection. The Supreme Court disagreed on both fronts.

What the Ruling Does—and Doesn't—Decide

The Supreme Court ruled that when law enforcement officials used a geofence warrant to obtain evidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank robbery, they conducted a "search" for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

By a vote of 6-3, the justices sent Okello Chatrie's case back to the lower court for it to consider whether, as the Fourth Amendment requires, the search was "reasonable."

The Court only decided that location information collected by Google from a user's cellphone is protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the total time for which the information was collected was only two hours. (In an earlier cell phone location case, the Supreme Court had only said that the Fourth Amendment protected the collection of data for seven days.)

The Supreme court left open the question whether that warrant was sufficient. There are many questions to resolve to determine whether the warrant met the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. Lower courts will now have to determine whether specific geofence warrants satisfy requirements for probable cause and particularity.

Impact on Law Enforcement and Tech Companies

Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with ACLU's Center for Democracy, called the new restrictions on geofence warrants "critical protection against invasive and overbroad government searches of our personal information."

"Law enforcement and courts are on notice that new technology does not open up surveillance loopholes, and strict adherence to the Fourth Amendment's protections is required," Kaufman said.

Google has since changed its policies on geofence warrants, storing the information on a user's phone rather than a separate database; however, companies such as Apple, Lyft, Snapchat and Uber still retain location information and could be impacted by the ruling, according to Michael Levy—a former federal prosecutor and adjunct professor at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

In December 2023, Google announced a significant policy change: Location History data would be migrated from Sensorvault to encrypted storage on individual users' devices, with a default deletion period reduced from 18 months to three months. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the move would effectively make it "impossible for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant."

The three dissenting justices—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett—argued the majority's decision would have limited practical impact. "Although today's decision will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine, not one iota of the majority opinion will affect the outcome of this case," Alito wrote, adding that he couldn't support what he called the "irresponsible escapade."

What Changed This Week

The Supreme Court established that cellphone location data held by tech companies receives Fourth Amendment protection, even when users have shared that data with third parties. The 6-3 ruling extends the court's 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision, which required warrants for cell tower location data, to the more precise location tracking offered by services like Google's Location History.

While the decision doesn't ban geofence warrants outright, it requires law enforcement to meet constitutional standards when requesting such data. The case now returns to lower courts to determine whether the specific warrant used to identify Chatrie was sufficiently narrow and supported by probable cause.

What to Watch

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will now reconsider whether the geofence warrant in Chatrie's case met Fourth Amendment requirements for probable cause and particularity. That decision could establish clearer guidelines for how law enforcement must structure geofence warrant requests.

Other pending cases involving geofence warrants will likely be affected by this ruling. Privacy advocates will push lower courts to apply strict scrutiny to the breadth of geofence searches and the multi-step process that allows police to progressively narrow their search from millions of users to specific individuals.

Tech companies beyond Google—including Apple, Uber, Lyft, and Snapchat—will need to evaluate how the ruling affects their obligations when law enforcement seeks location data. The decision may also influence debates over other forms of "reverse search" warrants, including keyword search warrants that identify users based on their search queries rather than their location.

Reporting based on coverage from ABC News, NPR, NBC News, TechCrunch, The Conversation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Engadget, Gizmodo, and legal analysis from University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, June 29-30, 2026.