Associate Attorney Patrick R. Campbell discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Chatrie v. United States, its implications for digital privacy and Fourth Amendment protections, and what the ruling could mean for the future of geofence warrants.
By: Patrick R. Campbell
The United States Supreme Court recently issued a major decision regarding important Fourth Amendment considerations and search-and-seizure law.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. It is one of the fundamental constitutional protections against government intrusion into a person’s privacy, property, and freedom. Until recently, law enforcement’s ability to compel a technology company (i.e., Google, Snapchat, Uber, etc.) to disclose important location information regarding cell phones was relatively unregulated.
The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Chatrie, which was handed down on June 29, 2026, was monumental for Fourth Amendment privacy rights. The high Court ruled 6-3 that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment “search” when they obtain a person’s cell phone location data via a geofence warrant.
In Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court confronted a central question in modern search-and-seizure law: whether law enforcement conducts a search when it compels a technology company to disclose historical location information identifying cellular devices present near a crime scene. The Court held that government acquisition of such location information constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment because individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell-phone location data. In reaching that conclusion, the Court extended the reasoning of Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), to Google Location History data and rejected the government’s contention that voluntarily enabling a location-tracking service eliminates constitutional protection.
The Court’s decision represents a significant development in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. It recognizes that the aggregation and retrospective examination of digital location information can implicate privacy interests even when the government examines a relatively short period of activity. Importantly, however, Chatrie does not establish that every geofence warrant is unconstitutional.
The Court ultimately remanded the case for consideration of whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause and particularity requirements, leaving the constitutionality of the warrant’s specific investigative procedures unresolved.
The Supreme Court’s decision to decide the case very narrowly is not uncommon. However, the Court’s decision in Chatrie was significant in several respects. The case represents a significant victory for privacy rights and should not be understated, although it was a narrow decision in terms of its implications for the Fourth Amendment.
Chatrie supplies a necessary constitutional foundation for regulating geofence warrants, but meaningful protection requires courts to examine each stage of a reverse-location search, including the initial collection of anonymous device information, subsequent expansion of location histories, and eventual disclosure of identifying information. A warrant’s constitutional validity should turn on individualized justification, narrowly defined investigative limits, and meaningful judicial control over the information exposed to law enforcement.
I. What is a Geofence?
Geofencing is a relatively new practice. It was invented in the early 1990s and was patented in 1995 by American inventor Michael Dimino, using novel GPS (Global Positioning System) and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology for a tracking system to locate objects anywhere on the globe from a remote location. GSM uses General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) for data transmissions, such as browsing the internet. GSM utilizes a cellular network, meaning that cell phones connect to it by searching for towers in the immediate vicinity.
While the Chatrie case was monumental in terms of challenging geofence warrants, the concept of a geofence is far from novel. A geofence is a virtual “perimeter” or “fence” around a given geographic feature. A geofence can be dynamically generated (as in a radius around a point location) or match a predefined set of boundaries, such as a school zone or neighborhood.
The use of a geofence is referred to as geofencing. One example of use involves a location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user entering or exiting a geofence. This method combines awareness of the user’s current location with awareness of the user’s proximity to locations that may be of interest. This activity could trigger an alert to the device’s user as well as a message to the geofence “operator.” This information, which could contain vehicle location data, could be sent to a mobile telephone or an email account.
While geofencing is used in many fields, including fleet management and marketing, it has in recent years raised significant privacy concerns. Law enforcement has increasingly used geofences and geofence warrants to collect data on all individuals within a specific area. This information can prove very important to investigations and prosecutions of individuals for several offenses.
A. Geofence Warrants and their History
Geofence warrants are, in essence, reverse location warrants. They are used by law enforcement to search a database to find all active mobile devices within a particular geofenced area. They have long been an important tool for law enforcement to obtain information regarding individuals’ whereabouts. It is notable that Chatrie was the first constitutional challenge to a geofence warrant. The decision signifies a significant setback for law enforcement’s ability to track suspects using such warrants absent a warrant backed by probable cause.
Geofence warrants were first used in 2016. Google’s “Sensorvault,” which collects users’ historical geolocation data, is one such example. Courts have historically granted law enforcement geofence warrants to obtain information from databases such as Sensorvault, which is maintained by Google and collects geolocation data.
Google has reported that it received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019, and 11,554 in 2020. A 2021 transparency report showed that 25% of data requests from law enforcement to Google were geofence data requests. Google is the most common recipient of geofence requests and the main provider of such data, though companies including Apple, Snapchat, Lyft, and Uber have also received warrants for geofence records.
B. The Chatrie Case and the Future of Geofence Warrants
On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Medlothian, Virginia. Local police officers learned from witness interviews and surveillance footage that the robber had approached the credit union from the corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but nothing more. The suspect remained at large. On June 14, police applied to a Virginia judicial official for a geofence warrant directed to Google, which would require Google to hand over data about the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union – the “geofence” – around the time the crime occurred.
The application for the search warrant described the cell phone location data Google collects through a service called Location History. The application also explained how that cell phone location data could help identify the robber, accomplices, or additional witnesses.
The magistrate issued the warrant, and through this process, Google ultimately produced three cell-phone users’ identifying information, including Okello Chatrie, whose location data showed that he entered the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery and headed towards a residential area immediately after leaving the bank. A federal grand jury later charged Chatrie with robbery and related firearms offenses, and he moved to suppress the information obtained by law enforcement from Google.
According to Chatrie, the officers had acquired the data through a Fourth Amendment search, and the warrant authorizing that search was invalid. The District Court found that the geofence warrant “plainly violates” the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment” but denied the motion based on the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. 590 F. Supp. 3d 901, 905, 937-938. A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court on different reasoning, holding that no search occurred because Chatrie “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.” 107 F. 4th 319, 325. The Fourth Circuit granted rehearing en banc, meaning the case was reconsidered by the full court rather than a smaller panel of judges, and affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam opinion, meaning an opinion issued by the court as a whole rather than attributed to a specific judge. The Supreme Court granted review only on the question of whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment in obtaining Chatrie’s location data.
II. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Holding
The United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, determined that the Fourth Amendment protects Chatrie’s reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell phone location data. The Court granted review on an additional question: whether the multi-step geofence warrant issued made that search reasonable. The Court declined to address whether the warrant at issue satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements at each stage of the search process, and left that issue for the Court of Appeals to address.
By determining that a search did occur in Chatrie, the Court expanded the jurisprudence of United States v. Carpenter, which held that “allowing government access to cell-site records contravenes” expectations of privacy. 585 U.S., at 311. Carpenter dealt with cell-site location information, which is distinct from the issue of geofencing.
While the Court established that a search occurred, which means police generally need a warrant to demand such data, it did not resolve whether the specific geofence warrant used against Okello Chatrie satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements, sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit for decision. Therefore, while the Chatrie case represented a victory for privacy concerns and against the government, it did not represent a complete shift in the law and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
West & Dunn is here to guide you through your criminal case and the fight against the government and for your privacy and rights against unreasonable searches. Do not hesitate to contact our team online through our Contact Us page or by telephone at (608) 535-6420 to get started.
