Legal Brief: An Update on the Legality of Geofence Warrants

Types : Bylined Articles

Landmark Supreme Court decision will reshape how law enforcement accesses location data and how the security industry thinks about the data it generates.

Where are you right now? Where were you an hour ago, or yesterday at noon? Do you consider that information private? The U.S. Supreme Court generally agrees that you should.

That may be oversimplifying it, but a landmark decision handed down on June 29, 2026, makes clear that your location history carries a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment.

In my March 2026 column, I wrote about Chatrie v. United States, which was then pending before the Supreme Court. The case concerned police access to geofence data – digital records of a person’s location maintained in a smartphone or cloud computer. The central question: does law enforcement’s gathering of that location data constitute a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, thereby triggering its constitutional protections? On June 29, the Court answered yes, by a 6–3 vote.