The Supreme Court Will Decide If Police Can Track Your Location Without a Warrant

On January 16, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could redefine privacy in the digital age. At stake is whether police can use "geofence warrants" to demand location data for every cellphone near a crime scene—without naming a single suspect.

The case, Chatrie v. United States, asks a question the framers of the Constitution never imagined: in an era when your phone tracks your every movement, does the Fourth Amendment still protect you from unreasonable searches?

What Geofence Warrants Actually Do

A geofence warrant allows law enforcement to draw a virtual boundary around a location and demand data on every device that entered that area during a specific time window. Police do not need to identify a suspect first. They cast a wide net and sort through the results later.

In the Chatrie case, police investigating a 2019 bank robbery in suburban Richmond, Virginia asked Google for location data on all devices within 150 meters of the crime scene during the hour of the robbery. Google's servers returned data on 19 devices. Police narrowed that to nine, then three, and eventually identified Okello Chatrie as a suspect. A search of his home allegedly uncovered nearly $100,000 in cash and incriminating evidence.

The technique has exploded in popularity. Google reported a 1,500% increase in geofence warrant requests between 2017 and 2018, followed by another 500% increase in 2019. Law enforcement agencies across the country now routinely use this tool.

The Constitutional Problem

The Fourth Amendment requires warrants to "particularly describe" the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. General warrants—broad authorizations to search without naming specific targets—are exactly what the amendment was designed to prohibit.

Critics argue geofence warrants function as modern general warrants. Instead of identifying a suspect and then gathering evidence, police gather data on everyone and hope to find a suspect somewhere in the results. The innocent get swept up alongside the guilty.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans agreed. In a 2024 ruling, the Fifth Circuit declared geofence warrants unconstitutional, comparing them to the colonial era general warrants that sparked the American Revolution. But the Fourth Circuit, reviewing the Chatrie case, reached the opposite conclusion in a fractured 2-1 decision.

Even the judge who allowed the evidence against Chatrie acknowledged the warrant "likely violated the Fourth Amendment." He admitted the evidence anyway under the good faith exception, reasoning that police reasonably relied on existing practices.

Why This Matters Beyond Location Data

The Supreme Court's ruling will extend far beyond geofence warrants. Stanford Law scholar Orin Kerr noted the decision could affect police searches of any large database—including email servers, financial records, and communication logs.

The government's position is straightforward: if you voluntarily share data with a third party like Google, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. Solicitor General David Sauer compared location data to any other "marker" a criminal might leave at a crime scene.

Privacy advocates counter that this reasoning would gut the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. Modern life requires sharing data with countless companies. If every piece of information you give to a service provider becomes fair game for law enforcement, the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches becomes meaningless.

The Email Connection

The same legal theory that justifies geofence warrants applies to email. Under the third party doctrine, information you share with your email provider—including message content, metadata, IP addresses, and login times—enjoys diminished constitutional protection.

Law enforcement can already obtain email records through various legal mechanisms. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits warrantless surveillance of international communications, including emails, for foreign intelligence purposes. The PRISM program allows the NSA to obtain communications directly from major technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

A ruling that broadly validates searches of third party data could expand these capabilities further. If the Court decides that location data shared with Google deserves no constitutional protection, the same logic could apply to messages, browsing history, and any other information stored on corporate servers.

What Happens Next

The Court will hear arguments later this year, with a ruling expected by July 2026. The decision will set boundaries for law enforcement's use of technology in investigations—boundaries that have been largely absent as surveillance capabilities outpaced legal frameworks.

Google has already changed its practices. In December 2023, the company began storing location data locally on devices rather than centrally on its servers, making geofence warrants targeting Google less effective. But other companies still maintain extensive location databases, and the legal questions raised by the case extend to any third party data.

For journalists, activists, and anyone whose work depends on source protection, the stakes are particularly high. Communications between reporters and sources often pass through third party servers. A ruling that weakens Fourth Amendment protections for shared data could chill the kind of confidential communications that investigative journalism requires.

The framers wrote the Fourth Amendment to prevent the government from conducting dragnet searches without specific targets. Two hundred years later, the Supreme Court will decide whether that protection survives the smartphone era.