Regan Glenn

07.06.2026

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 on June 29 holding that “geofence warrants” are searches under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, must be executed in accordance with the Amendment, that is, pursuant to a valid warrant or conducted pursuant to a recognized exception to the warrant requirement.

A geofence warrant compels a technology company to turn over its users’ location data to law enforcement. Requesting law enforcement agencies specify a timeframe and a geofence perimeter — a virtual boundary drawn around an area — and demand information about the cell phones and their users present within it in order to identify potential suspects.

In Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court held that officers conduct a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment when they obtain a person’s cell-phone location data through such a warrant. The Supreme Court reasoned that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” That is true even if the government seeks only a short window of location data and even if the data is held by a third-party technology company rather than by the individual himself.

The case arose from a May 2019 robbery of a credit union in Virginia, where a man stole $195,000. Police had no suspect; they knew only that the robber had approached the credit union from the corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone. A month later, the officers applied to a Virginia magistrate for a geofence warrant directing Google to identify the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union around the time of the robbery.

The warrant application set out a three-step process. First, Google produced anonymized location data for the 19 cell phones found within the geofence. Second, the officers narrowed the list, and Google provided expanded location data to include movements both inside and outside the geofence for nine users. Third, the officers narrowed the list again, and Google turned over identifying information for three users. One of them was Okello Chatrie, whose data showed that he entered the geofenced area about 10 minutes before the robbery. After he was charged, Chatrie moved to suppress the location data, arguing that the officers had obtained it through an unconstitutional search.

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, agreed that a search had occurred. As the justices explained, the Fourth Amendment protects a reasonable expectation of privacy and “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information” even where it is held by third-party technology companies.

The Supreme Court’s decision is consistent with its 2018 opinion, in Carpenter v. United States, whereby it held that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their Cell-site Location Information (CSLI), which is essentially a time-stamped record generated each time a cell phone connects to a cell tower, which can place an individual within a defined geographic area. Carpenter involved seven days’ worth of location data, and the Supreme Court expressly left open the question of whether there is a shorter period for which the government may obtain such data without implicating the Fourth Amendment.

In Chatrie, the Supreme Court clarified Carpenter, explaining that where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies “regardless of the quality or quantity of information” the government obtains. “[E]ven short-term monitoring,” the Supreme Court observed, can provide “a wealth of detail about [a person’s] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” and the Fourth Amendment has never been understood as “kicking in only once an intrusion goes too far.” The two hours of data at issue here was, therefore, no answer to the constitutional problem.

The ruling confirms that obtaining digital location data — whether from Google, Apple, a wireless carrier, a rideshare app or any other provider — is a Fourth Amendment search that ordinarily requires a warrant supported by probable cause. Neither the brevity of the window requested nor the fact that the data sits on a third party’s servers changes that result.

Notably, the Supreme Court did not decide whether this particular geofence warrant was valid. That question now returns to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.