Overview
- The Supreme Court ruled Monday in a 6-3 decision that police requests for Google Location History data count as a Fourth Amendment search.
- The justices vacated the lower-court judgment and sent Okello Chatrie’s case back for the district court to determine whether each step of the geofence process was reasonably tailored and supported by probable cause.
- Chatrie, who pleaded guilty in 2022 to a 2019 Midlothian, Virginia credit-union robbery and was sentenced to nearly 12 years, was identified after Google’s multi-step geofence query placed his device among about 19 accounts within 150 meters during the relevant hour.
- Government lawyers argued Chatrie’s choice to opt in to Google’s Location History reduced his privacy expectation, while defense lawyers and privacy advocates warned the technique sweeps in uninvolved bystanders and lacks needed specificity.
- The ruling leaves national limits unresolved and could prompt new lower-court rules on how investigators obtain location data, with potential effects on police practices and on how tech firms store and disclose location information.