The Supreme Court has ruled that location data on a phone is covered by the Fourth Amendment. That means police need a warrant to use data provided by phone companies and tech firms.

The case related to geofence searching, in which law enforcement officials investigating a case in a particular location ask companies to give them a list of all customers whose devices were active in a specific area at a specific time.

The legal dispute is not about whether the phone companies need to provide this data, but rather whether police can lawfully use the information without a search warrant. However, that may mean phone companies refuse to hand over the data unless and until they receive a warrant.

Searches Need Grounds For Suspicion

The case is a big change in the legal presumptions around such cases. To get a warrant, police will usually need specific grounds for suspicion about a particular person. At the moment, the geofence search itself is often the first time police identify a potential suspect.

Ironically the Supreme Court ruling won't immediately decide the case it was hearing, which involves a man convicted of a bank robbery. The court only concluded that the geofence request did in fact constitute a search. That means a lower court will need to decide whether that search was lawful and involved probable cause. (Source: therecord.media)

Rejecting the Third-Party Doctrine

One of the keys to the ruling was the court rejecting the government's argument that customers choose to make their location available to phone companies and thus no longer have the expectation of privacy.

That's an argument sometimes known as "third-party doctrine". While it's been upheld in many cases such as covering information provided by customers to a bank, the Supreme Court has sometimes limited its application in cases involving electronic data.

The ruling specifically said it was doing so in this case because providing location data to companies like Google is not a meaningful choice: it's a core requirement to use most of the services on a cellphone. It wrote that: "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." (Source: supremecourt.gov)

What's Your Opinion?

Do you think location data should always require a warrant? Are you concerned about how much data tech firms collect on you? Should the "third-party doctrine" be abolished entirely for digital data?