The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about a law enforcement technique that lets police ask large tech firms to search their location databases to identify people who were near a crime scene. The central question is whether that technique—known as geofencing—is an ingenious investigative tool, an Orwellian dragnet, or both, and whether it runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment.
Geofencing lets investigators draw a virtual perimeter around the area where a crime occurred and seek a warrant compelling a company to search its data for devices that were inside that perimeter at the relevant time. In the case before the Court, prosecutors relied on Google’s “location history” feature, which regularly recorded users’ locations by combining multiple data sources. If a phone was on and the feature enabled, Google could often pinpoint where its user was at specific moments.
When the case began in 2019, roughly one-third of Google users—about 500 million people—had opted into location history, and that data was stored on Google’s servers and accessible to law enforcement with a warrant under Google’s policies at the time. Stanford law professor Orin Kerr described geofencing as “a little bit of an investigative lottery ticket when they had no other way of finding a suspect.”
The constitutional issue centers on the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which requires warrants based on probable cause and particularized to the place to be searched and the items to be seized. Courts and scholars have long wrestled with how to apply an 18th-century amendment to modern technologies that can vastly expand government access to private information. Michael Dreeben, a veteran Supreme Court advocate for the Justice Department, notes the Court has repeatedly acted to protect privacy in the digital age to prevent arbitrary, dragnet surveillance.
The underlying criminal matter is a bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia. After a suspect with a gun fled with $195,000 and leads went cold, police applied for a geofence warrant directed at Google to obtain location records for devices within about a three–football-field area around the bank during roughly an hour surrounding the robbery. A state magistrate found probable cause and issued the warrant.
Google initially identified 19 devices that matched the geofence criteria but resisted turning over broad identifying information. After negotiations, the list was pared to nine and then three, whose identities Google disclosed. One of those, Okello Chatrie, was arrested; the others appear to have been innocent bystanders. Critics point out that geofencing can sweep up many innocent people—people going to church, visiting doctors, or attending political events—raising concerns about surveillance of lawful activity. Supporters note geofencing has also aided investigations, such as helping identify participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach who engaged in violence versus those who remained peaceful.
The government’s argument—advanced by the Trump administration in filings—contends that users who enabled Google’s location history voluntarily surrendered any reasonable expectation of privacy in that data, so the information is obtainable. The government also asserts the search was properly limited to Google’s servers where the data resided.
The defense, representing the defendant, argues the warrant was unconstitutional and functionally resembles a general warrant. At the Founding, general warrants that allowed broad searches of many homes were detested and spurred the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Defense counsel says the geofence warrant authorized searching “every single person’s account” to find evidence of a crime, requiring the company to sift through millions of accounts—more akin to searching a vast number of homes without individualized suspicion than a targeted search.
Dreeben framed the dispute as two core questions for the Court: whether geofence searches fall within the Fourth Amendment’s scope at all, and if so, whether people who opted into cloud location services effectively surrendered their privacy rights. He acknowledged that a travel log maintained for a person’s benefit—whether on paper or in the cloud—should be protected against arbitrary government intrusion.
How common geofence warrants are is uncertain. A Hofstra Law Review article reported that in 2020 law enforcement served roughly 11,500 geofence warrants on Google. The issue is likely to spawn more litigation as technology and law enforcement practices evolve. Google has changed how location history is stored—moving some data to users’ devices rather than central servers—to limit disclosures under older policies, but that doesn’t resolve broader questions about other types of cloud-stored records or how other companies might respond to government requests.
Google filed a brief in the case that does not take a definitive side but explicitly supports a warrant requirement and argues digital records should receive protections comparable to physical records. Other experts raise practical and doctrinal concerns: if all remotely stored records are fully shielded by the Fourth Amendment, can the government ever obtain digital evidence with a warrant? If not, how will law enforcement adapt?
Amicus briefs have come from a range of parties, including scholars and companies; some, like Stanford’s Orin Kerr, have sided with the government on aspects of the case. The Court’s decision, expected by summer, will address how far Fourth Amendment protections extend in the era of pervasive location tracking and whether geofence warrants are a permissible investigative technique or an unconstitutional form of mass surveillance.