The US Supreme Court protects your location data

On June 29, 2026, the US Supreme Court handed down an important ruling for privacy. In Chatrie v. United States, it held that police conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment when they demand a phone’s location history from a company. That holds even when the data sits on Google’s servers, even when police only ask for two hours of it, and even when the user turned the feature on.

What happened

In May 2019, an armed man stole US$195,000 from a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. With no suspect, police obtained a geofence warrant: they asked Google for every phone within 150 metres of the credit union over one hour.

Google first handed over anonymized data on 19 devices. Police then narrowed the list to 9 devices and obtained two hours of their movements, inside and outside the area. Finally, they obtained the names of 3 people, including Okello Chatrie. He pleaded guilty while keeping the right to challenge that evidence, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Court sided with him on the principle, 6 to 3. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion, put it this way:

A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do.

Justice Elena Kagan, Chatrie v. United States

Why it is a win

A geofence is a dragnet. Instead of looking for evidence about a suspect, police ask who was in a place, then look for a suspect in the list. Google received its first such warrant in 2016, 982 in 2018 and more than 11,000 in 2020. Each one could sweep in dozens of people whose only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The ruling changes two things:

Constitutional protections apply. Barring an emergency, police will have to convince a judge they have good reason to search this data, and describe precisely what they are looking for.
Handing your data to a company no longer means giving it up. The Court refused to apply the “third-party doctrine”, under which information given to a company is no longer private. It extends Carpenter, the 2018 ruling that already protected cell tower records.

The limits

The Court did not ban geofence warrants. A federal appeals court went further in 2024, calling them “general warrants” forbidden by the Constitution. The Supreme Court instead sent the case back to the appeals court, which must now decide whether each step of the warrant was justified. Okello Chatrie’s conviction, with a sentence of nearly 12 years, stands for now: the good-faith exception could still save the evidence.

Nor does the ruling settle other kinds of data, such as search history, or warrants that ask who searched for a given keyword.

And elsewhere?

Courts and lawmakers in other parts of the world have drawn similar lines.

European Union. In 2021, in H. K. v Prokuratuur, the Court of Justice of the EU reserved police access to location data for serious crime and serious threats to public security, after review by a court or an independent body, however short the period requested.
United Kingdom. Since 2019, an independent body under the Investigatory Powers Commissioner examines police requests for communications data, the “who, where, when and how” of a communication.
India. In 2017, in Puttaswamy, the Supreme Court unanimously recognized privacy as a fundamental right.
Canada. In 2024, in R. v. Bykovets, the Supreme Court protected IP addresses against unreasonable searches.

A lesson for everyone

One detail of the ruling deserves attention. Since July 2025, Google has stored location history on phones rather than on its servers. The company says it can no longer answer these warrants. Data that does not exist on a server cannot be seized.

What you can do

Turn off location history on your phone and only let apps see your location while you use them.
Use your right of access, under the GDPR in Europe or similar laws elsewhere, to see what location data companies hold about you.
Prefer services that keep your data on your device or encrypt it end to end.
To browse without revealing your IP address, which gives away your approximate location, use Tor Browser.
To decide who your location really needs to be hidden from, and how far to go, follow our guide Build your own threat model.