TL;DR: On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112) that a geofence warrant is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment. Justice Kagan wrote the 5-justice majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment, calling the location data on a smartphone the user's "personal property," no different from other "effects" the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects. Justice Alito dissented, joined in part by Justice Thomas and Justice Barrett; Justice Barrett filed a separate dissent. The Court did not declare geofence warrants facially unconstitutional, and it left for remand whether the "good faith" exception saves Chatrie's conviction. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief with the ACLU, ACLU of Virginia, and Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology, called the ruling the first major digital-surveillance victory since Carpenter v. United States (2018).
The Ruling
The Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States on June 29, 2026, two months after oral arguments on April 27. The case was No. 25-112, the docket number the justices granted back in January [1].
The holding, in a sentence: a geofence warrant is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment [2].
Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion. She was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Justice Jackson filed a concurrence, joined by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Gorsuch filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Alito filed a dissent, joined by Justice Thomas as to Part I, and joined by Justice Barrett as to Parts II-B, II-C-1, and II-C-2. Justice Barrett filed a separate dissenting opinion [2].
The result is a 5-justice majority, with Gorsuch bringing the bottom-line ruling against the government to 6-3. The Court did not hold that geofence warrants are facially unconstitutional. It held that the specific warrant in Chatrie's case, a 2019 warrant that pulled anonymized data on 19 phones within 150 meters of a Midlothian, Virginia bank robbery, was an unconstitutional search. The case now goes back to the Fourth Circuit on remand to decide whether the "good faith" exception still saves the evidence [1][2].
What the Court Actually Said
The Court extended Carpenter v. United States (2018), the precedent that forced police to get a warrant for cell-site location records, to the shorter-term tracking in geofence warrants. EFF's analysis of the opinion: even short-term surveillance of smartphone location data can reveal "private matters," including "a wealth of detail about a person's familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations" [1].
The majority also rejected the argument that the data belongs to Google rather than the user. App-generated records, the Court said, are the user's "own," whether they sit on the phone or on a third-party server, and they include not just location data but "emails, documents, photographs, [ ] calendars" and similar material [1].
The Court quoted users' reasonable expectation that their data "be shielded from the 'inquisitive eyes' of the government," language that maps directly onto the long line of Fourth Amendment search cases [1].
And the Court captured the practical stakes in a single line: "the point of carrying smartphones is to use [them]," so the Fourth Amendment has to protect more than just the location data the phone generates. The data on the phone is the user's life [1].
Gorsuch's Concurrence: Location Data as "Personal Property"
Justice Gorsuch's concurrence is the part of the ruling that will have the longest reach. He agreed with the bottom-line result (the geofence warrant was a search), but on a textualist ground that goes further than Kagan's majority opinion.
Location data on a phone is the user's "personal property," Gorsuch wrote, no different from the other "effects" the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects from unreasonable search and seizure [1].
The Fourth Amendment protects "persons, houses, papers, and effects." Effects include your stuff. Gorsuch's argument is that the digital contents of your phone are your effects for the same reason a paper diary in your house is.
If a future Court builds on that framing, the third-party doctrine, the legal fiction that you give up privacy by sharing data with a company, has a much harder time surviving in any context. EFF said it "look[s] forward to citing Chatrie to press future courts to recognize broad Fourth Amendment protections for user data" beyond location history [1].
How the Case Got Here
The case grew out of a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia. Police had no suspect, so they served Google with a geofence warrant for a 150-meter radius around the bank during a two-hour window [3].
Google searched its location database and returned anonymized data for 19 phones that were in the area. Police narrowed the list to 9, then to 3, then unmasked the names. Chatrie was one of them. Eighteen of the 19 phones belonged to bystanders [1][3].
EFF noted the geofence covered more than 70,000 square meters, "several football fields," including homes, businesses, and a church. The people whose data was swept up were inside that circle doing ordinary things, none of which was robbing a bank [1].
A federal district court in Virginia ruled in 2022 that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment but applied the "good faith" exception to keep the evidence in. The Fifth Circuit held in 2024, in United States v. Smith, that geofence warrants are "categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment." The Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, divided 7-7 on the search question in 2025 and affirmed the good-faith outcome. That 7-7 split is what pushed the case to Washington [1][3].
What the Court Did Not Decide
The ruling is narrow in two ways that matter for the next round of surveillance fights.
First, the Court did not strike down geofence warrants as a class. It held that the specific execution of the warrant against Google in this case was a Fourth Amendment search. Future warrants, the Court implied, could be drafted to satisfy the warrant requirement with particularized probable cause for each person swept up, an extraordinarily high bar, but not necessarily impossible. The tool survives in theory, even if the practice has been gutted [2].
Second, the Court did not decide whether the "good faith" exception applies. The case goes back to the Fourth Circuit to resolve that question. If good faith saves the conviction, Chatrie's federal sentence stands. If it does not, his conviction is vacated and the case against him likely collapses on remand [1].
EFF's framing: the constitutional question is settled, the practical remedy is still in play. The principle outlives Chatrie's case either way.
What the Ruling Actually Changes
For police and prosecutors, the immediate impact is the most direct: serving a geofence warrant on Google is no longer a clean, off-the-shelf investigative tool. The data they get back from the Step 1 dragnet is now the product of a Fourth Amendment search, which means a warrant supported by probable cause for the specific person they're after, not a generic warrant naming "all phones in this area" [1].
For everyone else, the change is structural. EFF noted that the Court recognized the practical reality of how a smartphone is actually used: "the point of carrying smartphones is to use [them]." If your phone is your diary, your photo album, your calendar, your contact list, and your map, then the Fourth Amendment has to reach inside it the same way it reaches inside your house [1].
And the Gorsuch concurrence opens a door to a broader challenge. If location data is "personal property" under the Fourth Amendment's text, then search histories, browser histories, app-generated content, and any other user data sitting on a company server is a candidate for the same treatment. EFF said it expects to use Chatrie as a foundation in future cases on data generated by other apps, "even when users 'agree' to share with third-party tech companies" [1].
Why This Is Mostly Symbolic for Google
The Google side of this fight is already over. In 2023, Google announced it would stop storing location data centrally, moving it to user devices, encrypted so Google could not read it. EFF noted that since July 2025, mass geofence searches of Google users have not been technically possible [1].
But EFF noted that Google's earlier storage commitments lacked an independent audit and were not a binding legal obligation, and the change was voluntary. The Supreme Court ruling is what makes the principle binding: even if a future Google decides to centralize location data again, the Fourth Amendment will now require a warrant supported by particularized probable cause before the company can be forced to hand it over.
And the ruling is not just about Google. Wireless carriers collect cell-site location information. Fitness apps track runs. Connected cars log every drive. Smart-home devices map the inside of your house. The same logic Kagan applied to Google's geofence records applies to all of them. EFF listed the next targets in the same post: data brokers aggregating app location data, "cell tower dump" warrants covering every device near a tower, automated license plate readers, and electronic monitoring ankle bracelets [1].
What to Watch
The Fourth Circuit on remand. The single biggest open question is whether the "good faith" exception saves Chatrie's conviction. If the Fourth Circuit applies good faith, Chatrie's case ends. If it does not, his conviction is vacated, and the practical effect of the ruling shows up immediately in federal criminal procedure across the circuit.
State courts. The Supreme Court decided a federal Fourth Amendment question. State constitutional privacy clauses in California, New Jersey, Illinois, and elsewhere are independent. Lawyers will start citing Chatrie in state-court suppression motions within weeks.
Reverse keyword warrants. The same logic that killed the dragnet geofence warrant, a warrant for the identity of everyone who searched for a victim's name during a time window, is now on shakier ground. Both the EFF and the Chatrie petitioners flagged the parallel in their briefs.
Data-broker warrants. EFF specifically named the data-broker industry as a likely next front. Police have been buying location data from brokers to avoid warrants entirely. The argument that this is a "sale" and not a "search" is now in serious constitutional trouble after Gorsuch's "personal property" framing.
Congress. Federal bills to require warrants for geofence and reverse-keyword warrants have been introduced in prior Congresses. Today's ruling gives those proposals a constitutional foundation they did not have before. The legislative fight is on stronger ground.
Sources
Published: June 30, 2026