Background
On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, stealing $195,000 at gunpoint. Witnesses and surveillance footage showed the robber approached from a nearby church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but investigators had no suspect. Twenty-five days later, local police obtained a geofence warrant directed to Google, seeking Location History data for all cell phones within a 150-meter radius of the credit union during the hour surrounding the robbery. Google’s Location History service — enabled by over 500 million users worldwide — records a device’s precise location every two minutes using GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell-site signals, accurate to within 20 meters and capable of estimating a phone’s floor within a building.
The warrant prescribed a three-step process: at step one, Google produced anonymized location data for 19 devices within the geofence; at step two, police narrowed the list to 9 and received additional anonymized data covering a two-hour window and locations outside the geofence; at step three, police narrowed further to 3 users and received their names and phone numbers. One of those users was petitioner Okello Chatrie, whose data showed he entered the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery and departed toward a residential area immediately after. A federal grand jury charged Chatrie with robbery and related firearms offenses.
Chatrie moved to suppress the Google data, arguing the police had conducted an unreasonable Fourth Amendment search. The District Court agreed the geofence warrant “plainly violates” the Fourth Amendment but denied suppression under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. A divided Fourth Circuit panel affirmed on different grounds — holding that no search had occurred at all because Chatrie lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in “two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.” The en banc Fourth Circuit affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam, with the fourteen-judge court splitting 7-7 on whether any search had occurred. The Supreme Court granted certiorari solely on that threshold question.
The Court’s Holding
In an opinion by Justice Kagan joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, the Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie’s Location History data from Google. Individuals retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell-phone location information, and government intrusion on that interest — even for a limited time window and even through a third-party company — constitutes a search. The Court grounded its analysis in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) is a Fourth Amendment search because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. The Court held that everything Carpenter relied upon applies with equal or greater force to Location History: it is more granular than CSLI (pinpointing location within 20 meters rather than within sectors of up to four square miles), records far more frequently (approximately 720 chartings per day versus 101 for CSLI), and can reveal which floor of a building a user occupies.
The Court rejected two principal government arguments. First, it dismissed the contention that acquiring only a short window of location data falls outside the Fourth Amendment’s reach, reaffirming that the Amendment applies regardless of the quality or quantity of information obtained — and that even brief monitoring can expose a “wealth of detail” about a person’s associations. Second, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, extending Carpenter‘s reasoning that Location History — like CSLI — is “not truly ‘shared'” in any meaningful sense. Google prompts users to enable Location History with warnings that devices will not “work correctly” without it, without disclosing how frequently or precisely location is recorded or how it might be furnished to the government. Using one’s smartphone for its intended purposes does not amount to voluntarily sharing private location data with the government.
The Court vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and remanded without resolving the second question: whether the unusual, multi-step geofence warrant actually satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause at each stage of the search process. Because the Fourth Circuit had not yet addressed those questions — having ruled on threshold search grounds — the Court declined to decide them in the first instance. The Court also left open, for the Fourth Circuit to consider on remand, whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule would in any event permit admission of the evidence. Justice Jackson filed a concurrence joined by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment. Justice Alito dissented, joined in part by Justices Thomas and Barrett. Justice Barrett filed a separate dissent.
Key Takeaways
- Geofence warrants that compel Google to produce Location History data constitute Fourth Amendment “searches,” meaning law enforcement must satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements — not merely request the data without judicial oversight.
- The Court extended Carpenter v. United States to Location History, finding it even more constitutionally sensitive than CSLI: greater precision, higher recording frequency, and the fact that users interact with it as a personal record rather than a passive byproduct of using a carrier’s network.
- The third-party doctrine does not strip Fourth Amendment protection from Location History data; using smartphone features does not equate to voluntarily disclosing one’s movements to the government, especially where Google’s own prompts obscure the nature and extent of data collection.
- Duration alone does not determine constitutional coverage — even a two-hour window of location data triggers the Fourth Amendment — leaving open that shorter windows receive the same protection.
- Critical questions remain unresolved on remand: whether the three-step geofence warrant process satisfies the particularity and probable cause requirements at each step, and whether the good-faith exception saves the evidence regardless.
Why It Matters
This decision resolves a long-simmering circuit conflict and establishes for the first time that geofence warrants — a tool law enforcement used more than 11,000 times in a single year before Google changed its data-storage architecture in 2025 — are subject to the Fourth Amendment. By anchoring Location History within the same constitutional framework as CSLI, the Court signals that the digital-age privacy principles of Carpenter extend to an expanding universe of granular, comprehensive data that smartphones generate as a matter of course. Even though Google has since moved Location History storage to individual devices (rendering it largely inaccessible via geofence warrant going forward), the ruling governs a vast backlog of pending prosecutions in which such warrants were used, and sets doctrine that will govern similar warrants directed to other companies that retain location data on their servers.
The decision also deepens the Court’s ongoing reassessment of the third-party doctrine in the digital context. By rejecting the argument that enabling a Google service constitutes meaningful voluntary disclosure to a third party, the majority further narrows the government’s ability to obtain comprehensive digital records without a warrant simply because they happen to pass through a company’s servers. The particularity and probable cause questions sent back to the Fourth Circuit — especially whether a warrant can satisfy those requirements when it seeks data about every device in a geofence before any suspect has been identified — will be of acute practical significance to prosecutors, defense lawyers, and magistrate judges nationwide.