Key Takeaways
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 29, 2026, that a geofence warrant for cellphone location data is a search under the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that people keep a reasonable expectation of privacy in records of where their phone has been, even when a third-party company holds the data.
The justices sent Okello Chatrie's case back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the search was reasonable, putting police use of geofence warrants on notice.
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that when police used a geofence warrant to pull Google location data on everyone near a 2019 Virginia bank robbery, they carried out a search under the Fourth Amendment. The 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, reported by SCOTUSblog, sends the case back to a lower court to weigh whether that search was reasonable.
A geofence warrant draws a virtual boundary around a place and a time, then asks a tech company to identify every user inside it. In the Chatrie case, Google first handed over 19 accounts within 150 meters of the bank during the half hour around the robbery, then nine accounts across a two-hour window, and finally the names tied to three accounts, one of them Chatrie's. That trail led police to roughly $100,000 in stolen cash, a gun, and the demand notes.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan held that a person keeps a reasonable expectation of privacy in the records of where a phone has been, and that police intrude on that interest when they demand the data, even for a short window and even from a third party. The Court rejected the government's argument that no warrant was needed at all.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, warning that the majority had unsettled decades of search-and-seizure law.
"will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine"
Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting
The ruling lands as courts and companies keep redrawing the line between law enforcement access and digital privacy, the same tension WYDE has tracked in the fight over a DeFi provision that would widen law-enforcement reach into crypto and in efforts to put cryptographic receipts on sensitive data. For now, the dragnet that once ran on a single warrant has to clear a higher bar. Worth watching how lower courts apply it.
People Also Ask
What did the Supreme Court decide about geofence warrants?
The Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that using a geofence warrant to obtain cellphone location data is a search under the Fourth Amendment, so police need a valid warrant for it.
What is a geofence warrant?
A geofence warrant draws a virtual boundary around a location and time period and directs a tech company such as Google to identify the users whose devices were inside it.
Does the ruling throw out the geofence evidence?
Not automatically. The justices sent Chatrie's case back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the search was reasonable, so the evidence question is still open.
Why does the geofence ruling matter for digital privacy?
It extends Fourth Amendment protection to location records held by third-party companies, limiting how broadly police can sweep cellphone data to find a suspect.