U.S. Supreme Court: Obtaining a Person’s Google Location History Is a Fourth Amendment Search
Criminal Defense Lawyer Zak T. Goldstein, Esquire
The United States Supreme Court has decided Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), holding that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s cell-phone location data from Google. The decision extends the Court’s landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), to the geofence warrants that law enforcement has increasingly used to identify suspects by sweeping up the location data of every phone near a crime scene. Writing for the Court, Justice Kagan held that the police conducted a search “because an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location data,” and that they intrude on that interest even when they take it “for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”
The decision is a significant win for digital privacy and for the defense, but it does not end the case. The Court decided only that a search occurred. It left for the lower court whether this particular warrant was valid, and it did not disturb the separate ruling that has allowed the evidence into Mr. Chatrie’s prosecution so far.
The Facts of Chatrie
On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. He handed the teller a note demanding $100,000, threatened to hurt her and her family, and claimed he had lookouts outside. When she said she could not access that much money, he brandished a firearm, ordered everyone to the floor, and forced the manager to put $195,000 into a bag before leaving on foot. Witnesses and surveillance footage showed that the robber had approached from a corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but the investigation stalled and he remained at large.
Weeks later, the police applied to a Virginia magistrate for a geofence warrant directed to Google. A geofence warrant does not name a suspect. It draws a virtual perimeter around a location and compels a company to turn over data about the cell phones that were inside it around the time of a crime. The goal, as the Court put it, “is to find out who was there and so who might have done it.” The warrant here used a 150-meter circle around the credit union and followed a three-step process Google had developed with law enforcement: first, Google would produce anonymized location data for every phone in the geofence during the hour surrounding the robbery; second, the police would narrow the list and Google would provide more data, now reaching outside the geofence over a two-hour window; and third, Google would hand over names and other identifying information for a final, narrowed set of users.
The data came from a Google service called Location History, which more than 500 million users worldwide had turned on. Location History logs a phone’s location roughly every two minutes, drawing on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell sites, GPS, and IP address information to fix the phone’s position within about twenty meters. It can even estimate elevation, which can reveal what floor of a building a phone is on. The district court described it as “the most sweeping, granular, and comprehensive tool” available for collecting and storing location data.
Running the warrant’s process, Google produced anonymized data for 19 phones at step one, the officers narrowed the list to 9 at step two, and the final list at step three contained 3 users. One was Okello Chatrie. His Location History showed that he entered the geofenced area about ten minutes before the robbery and headed toward a residential area immediately after leaving the bank. A federal grand jury charged him with robbery and related firearms offenses, and he moved to suppress the location evidence.
The lower courts splintered. The district court found that the warrant “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment” but admitted the evidence anyway under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit affirmed on the different ground that no search had occurred at all, reasoning that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in “two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.” Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit split evenly, 7 to 7, on whether a search had taken place and affirmed in a one-sentence order. The Supreme Court agreed to decide that single question: whether obtaining the location data was a search.
What the Supreme Court Decided
The Court held that it was. The analysis tracked Carpenter, which held that obtaining historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a search because people have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.” Everything that drove Carpenter, the Court explained, “applies as well or better” to Location History. The data is more precise, fixing a phone within about twenty meters rather than within a sector of one-eighth to four square miles. It is more frequent, averaging 720 location points a day against roughly 101 for the cell-site data in Carpenter. And it is more personal: users treat Location History as a record of their own movements, much like the “emails, documents, photographs, or calendars” that a person “reasonably views as his own” even when a company stores them.
The Court rejected the government’s argument that two hours of data is too brief to matter. Quoting Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), it noted that “even short-term monitoring” can reveal “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” The Fourth Amendment, it added, has never been understood to apply only once an intrusion “goes too far”; it applies regardless of “the quality or quantity of information” obtained. The concern is that the government can reach “all of a cell-phone user’s movements,” giving it “a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities,” and the ability to pick out a short window from that database after the fact is “more a practical benefit to the government than a limit on its intrusive powers.”
The Court also refused to apply the third-party doctrine, which ordinarily strips Fourth Amendment protection from information a person hands over to a business. As in Carpenter, location data is “qualitatively different” from the bank records and dialed phone numbers in the Court’s older cases, and it is “not truly shared” in any ordinary sense. The government argued that Location History is different because users must switch it on, but the Court was unpersuaded. Google “repeatedly prompts users” to enable the service, sometimes warning that a device will not “work correctly” otherwise, while saying nothing about how often it records location, how precise that location is, or that the data may end up with the government. Treating each app and feature as a separate, voluntary surrender of privacy, the Court said, “misapprehends the very nature of modern cell-phone use,” where almost everything requires some affirmative opt-in.
The holding is direct: “It does not matter if the time period scrutinized was only two hours. Nor does it matter that the materials obtained were handed over by a third-party tech company.” Accessing Location History is a search.
Where the Court stopped is just as important. A search is not automatically unconstitutional; the Fourth Amendment bars only unreasonable ones, and a search conducted under a valid warrant is generally reasonable. The Court called this an “uncommon, multi-step” warrant and declined to decide whether it satisfied the requirements of probable cause and particularity at each step. Describing itself as “a court of review, not of first view,” it sent that question back to the Fourth Circuit. It also left untouched the good-faith ruling that allowed the evidence in to begin with.
The Court divided 6 to 3. Justice Kagan wrote for five members. Justice Gorsuch agreed that a search occurred but would have reached that result by treating the Location History as Chatrie’s property rather than through the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, wrote separately to say she would have gone further and held the warrant invalid at steps two and three, where it gave officers what an earlier case called a “roving commission” to gather more data without returning to a magistrate. Justice Alito, joined in part by Justices Thomas and Barrett, dissented, arguing among other things that the third-party doctrine should control and that the opinion was effectively advisory because it would not change the outcome of Chatrie’s case. Justice Barrett also dissented separately.
The Takeaway
Chatrie matters on two levels. Doctrinally, it confirms that Carpenter was not confined to its facts. The government had hoped to read Carpenter narrowly, as a rule about long-term tracking of a single suspect that left short, location-specific requests like geofences untouched. The Court rejected that reading and made clear that the warrant requirement turns on the nature of the surveillance, not the number of hours of data the police choose to take. Justice Alito’s dissent warns that the majority’s reasoning will not stay limited to location data, and points to Amazon purchase histories, Google search histories, and payment apps as the next disputes. Whatever one makes of that concern, it cuts in the defense’s favor: the logic of Chatrie gives defendants a serious argument that other revealing digital records held by third parties are protected as well.
On the practical level, the decision matters for any case built on digital location evidence. The government can no longer defend a geofence or similar location search by claiming that no search occurred and no warrant was needed. That forces the fight onto the warrant itself, which is where the defense has the better arguments. As Justice Jackson’s concurrence and the district court’s own findings show, these multi-step warrants often let officers decide for themselves which users to pursue, with little guidance from the magistrate, and the data reached movements to and from homes, a school, and a hospital. Those are the particularity and probable-cause defects that suppression motions should target on remand and in future cases.
Two cautions are worth stating plainly. First, Chatrie himself has not won. The Court decided only that a search occurred and remanded everything else, including the good-faith question that has kept the evidence in his case from the start. A favorable ruling on the constitutional question does not guarantee suppression when a court is willing to excuse the violation as reasonable reliance on a warrant. Second, this particular technique is already fading. Google has represented that, as of July 2025, it stores Location History on users’ own devices and can no longer respond to geofence warrants for that data. The lasting significance of Chatrie lies less in the specific procedure it addressed than in the principle it confirms: new tools do not shrink old protections, and the government generally needs a warrant before it can turn a person’s phone into a record of everywhere they have been.
Finally, the real takeaway from Chatrie is that the Court has drastically limited the third-party doctrine for electronic data. In this case, it applied to the location data stored by Google. But ultimately, the Court seems inclined to recognize a reasonable expectation of privacy in other types of electronic data where even though the generation of that data is arguably optional, the reality is that people have no choice if they want to exist in the modern world. The Court has now applied it to cell phone location data and Google location data, and it could expand into other areas. The Pennsylvania Constitution has already recognized this and has a much more limited version of the doctrine.
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