On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential digital-privacy rulings in years. In Chatrie v. United States,[1] the Court held 6-3 that police conduct a Fourth Amendment “search” when they obtain a person’s cell-phone location data from a third party such as Google—even for a short period, and even when that data was handed over to a private company. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan concluded that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the detailed record of their movements collected by their cell phone. For any business that collects, stores, or holds customer data, the decision is required reading.
The Case in Brief:
The dispute grew out of the May 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where a man fled with roughly $195,000. When the investigation stalled, police turned to a “geofence warrant.” Rather than establishing probable cause against a known suspect, officers identified a location and a timeframe and demanded that Google search its user data to identify everyone who happened to be within a 150-meter radius of the bank around the time of the crime.
Google complied through a three-step process: it first produced anonymized data for 19 devices, then expanded, two-hour tracking histories for a narrowed list, and finally the subscriber information for three users—including the defendant Okello Chatrie. Chatrie moved to suppress the evidence, arguing the warrant amounted to an unconstitutional general warrant. The lower courts fractured badly, with the en banc Fourth Circuit splitting evenly on whether a search had even occurred.
The Holding: A Meaningful Limit on the Third-Party Doctrine:
The Supreme Court’s core holding is that accessing this location data is a search that triggers Fourth Amendment protection. The decision leans heavily on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which held a warrant is required for cell-site location information. Justice Kagan reasoned that location history paints an even more “fine-tuned picture of a person’s movements” than the cell-site data at issue in Carpenter, pinpointing a phone’s position within roughly twenty meters.
Most significant for businesses, the Court meaningfully limited the “third-party doctrine”, which is the long-standing principle that information voluntarily shared with a company loses Fourth Amendment protection. The government argued that users forfeit their privacy rights when they enable location features and accept a company’s terms of service. The majority rejected that view, reasoning that users do not truly “share” such sensitive data in a way that forfeits their rights, even when the service is opt-in. As Justice Kagan put it, “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”. The Court also dismissed the argument that the brief, 2-hour window was too short to matter, holding that where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies regardless of the “quality or quantity of information” obtained.
Notably, the Court did not decide whether this particular warrant was valid. It vacated and remanded, leaving the lower court to determine whether the warrant’s multistep process satisfied probable cause and particularity requirements at each step.
Why Business Should Pay Attention:
The ruling reaches well beyond geofence warrants and criminal robbery cases. The reasoning suggests that a wide range of sensitive customer data your company holds may now carry Fourth Amendment protection, notwithstanding that customers entrusted it to you under a terms-of-service agreement. The majority analogized location history to emails, documents, photographs, and calendars which, even if stored on a company’s servers, a user may reasonably view as their own.
A few practical takeaways:
- Expect more legal process, and more litigation over it. Government demands for data increasingly take the form of “reverse searches” that demand data for all users tied to keyword searches or even AI chatbot prompts. Companies that gather data to serve customers are being pressured to run investigations on the government’s behalf—both criminal and civil. A demand that once looked routine may now require a warrant, giving your business grounds to push back before turning over records.
- Data architecture is now a legal-risk decision. Tellingly, Google moved its location history to on-device storage and, as a result, states it can no longer respond to geofence warrants at all. How and where you store customer data directly affects what you can be compelled to produce. Data minimization protects you and your customers.
- The law remains unsettled. The continued absence of comprehensive privacy legislation leaves the judiciary to map these boundaries case by case. That uncertainty calls for caution whenever the government seeks your customers’ data through a subpoena, warrant, or informal request.
Chatrie is a reminder that handing over data can implicate constitutional rights, and that the right first step is often a call to counsel.
This post is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice.
[1] Chatrie v. United States, 25-112, 2026 WL 1855568 (U.S. June 29, 2026), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf.
