Supreme Court Will Decide If Police Can Track Every Nearby Phone

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TL;DR: On January 16, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Chatrie v. United States, the first case to decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. These warrants let police draw a circle on a map, pick a time window, and force Google to search its entire database of 592 million accounts to identify every phone that was nearby. The Fifth Circuit says they're unconstitutional. The Fourth Circuit couldn't agree. The case started with a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia. It could end with a ruling that affects every smartphone in America. Oral arguments are expected this spring, with a decision by summer 2026.

A Bank Robbery in Suburban Virginia

On May 20, 2019, Okello Chatrie walked into the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, and handed a teller a note: "I got your family as hostage and I know where you live." He walked out with $195,000 ^[1].

Detectives had no suspect. So they tried something relatively new. They got a warrant ordering Google to search its location database (a system called Sensorvault) and hand over data on every phone within 150 meters of the bank during a two-hour window ^[1].

Google searched its database. All of it. Every account. It returned data on 19 phones that were near the credit union that afternoon ^[2].

Eighteen of those people had nothing to do with the robbery. They were just nearby: getting gas, eating lunch, driving past. Their location data was pulled into a criminal investigation because they happened to have a phone in their pocket.

The 19th was Chatrie. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to nearly 12 years in federal prison. His lawyers challenged the warrant. That challenge just reached the Supreme Court ^[3].

How Geofence Warrants Actually Work

Traditional warrants work like this: police have a suspect, and they ask a judge for permission to search that suspect's stuff. The Fourth Amendment requires "probable cause" and a "particular description" of what they're looking for.

Geofence warrants flip this entirely. Police don't have a suspect. They have a location and a time. They ask Google: who was there?

The process runs in three steps:

Step 1: The Dragnet. Google searches its Sensorvault (which at its peak held location data from 592 million individual accounts) and returns anonymized device IDs for every phone in the area. Google logs location data from Android phones on average every two minutes, using GPS, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and Bluetooth ^[4].

Step 2: The Narrowing. Police review the anonymous list and ask Google for expanded location data on devices they find suspicious. Where did they go before? After? Google provides that data, still anonymized.

Step 3: The Unmasking. Police pick specific devices and Google reveals who owns them. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, subscriber details.

The Fifth Circuit described the core problem bluntly: "Law enforcement cannot obtain its requested location data unless Google searches through the entirety of its Sensorvault, all 592 million individual accounts, for all of their locations at a given point in time" ^[5].

That's not a targeted search. That's a digital dragnet.

How Big Is This?

Geofence warrants exploded from 982 in 2018 to 11,554 in 2020. By 2021, they accounted for 25% of all law enforcement data requests to Google. That's one in four ^[4].

From 2017 to 2018, requests surged by over 1,500%. Google stopped publishing granular numbers after 2021 ^[4].

The collateral damage is real. Jorge Molina, an Arizona man, spent six days in jail after a geofence warrant placed his phone near a murder scene. He'd lent his phone to his mother's ex-boyfriend, who turned out to be the killer. Molina lost his job. Dozens of media outlets identified him as a murder suspect. He had nothing to do with it ^[6].

A Florida man became a burglary suspect because he rode his bicycle past a house that had been broken into ^[6].

In Chatrie's case, 18 out of 19 phones flagged belonged to innocent bystanders. That's a 95% false-positive rate on a single warrant.

The Courts Can't Agree

The Fifth Circuit (covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) ruled in August 2024 that geofence warrants are "modern-day general warrants" that are categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. In United States v. Smith, the court wrote: "These geofence warrants fail at Step 1: they allow law enforcement to rummage through troves of location data from hundreds of millions of Google users without any description of the particular suspect" ^[5].

The court compared them to the "writs of assistance" that British soldiers used to search colonists' homes at will, one of the grievances that sparked the American Revolution.

The Fourth Circuit (covering Virginia, the Carolinas, and four other states) couldn't decide. In April 2025, the full court voted 14-1 to keep Chatrie's conviction. But the 15 judges wrote nine separate opinions spanning 126 pages. Some said geofence warrants aren't searches at all. Some said they are searches but the evidence was admissible anyway. One judge said the evidence should have been thrown out entirely ^[3].

No majority opinion. No clear rule. The kind of mess that gets a case to the Supreme Court.

What the Supreme Court Will Decide

On January 16, 2026, the justices granted certiorari on a single question: "Whether the execution of [a] geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment" ^[7].

Michael Price, the NACDL attorney representing Chatrie, put it simply: "One cannot conceive of any circumstance in which a court would authorize law enforcement to conduct a general search of every premise within 150 meters of any crime." A geofence warrant does exactly that, digitally ^[8].

The case builds on Carpenter v. United States (2018), where the Court ruled 5-4 that police need a warrant to access cell-site location records. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that such data provides "an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations" ^[9].

Geofence warrants go further than what Carpenter involved. Cell-site records track one known suspect. Geofence warrants search everyone and then pick suspects from the results.

Amicus briefs are piling up. X Corp. (formerly Twitter) filed in support of Chatrie, arguing all searches of private property require warrants based on individualized probable cause. The EFF, ACLU, and NYU's Tech, Law & Policy Clinic have weighed in too ^[7].

Oral arguments are expected in spring 2026. A decision should land by late June or early July.

Google's Exit (Sort Of)

In December 2023, Google announced it would stop storing location data centrally. Instead, Location History would be kept on users' devices, encrypted so even Google can't read it. The change rolled out through 2024 ^[10].

If the change works as advertised, Google literally can't comply with geofence warrants anymore. The data isn't there to hand over.

But there are catches. The EFF called Google's commitments "pinkie promises": no independent audit, no binding legal obligation ^[10]. And the policy change doesn't affect data collected before 2024. It doesn't help Chatrie, whose data was collected in 2019. And it doesn't stop police from serving geofence warrants on other companies that collect location data: wireless carriers, fitness apps, car manufacturers, smart-home device companies.

Google was just the only company with the infrastructure to respond to these warrants at scale. If the Supreme Court rules them constitutional, every company that tracks your location becomes a potential target.

The Next Front: Reverse Keyword Warrants

Geofence warrants aren't the only "reverse" surveillance tool in play. Reverse keyword warrants ask Google to identify everyone who searched for specific terms (a victim's name, an address, a phone number) during a given time period.

Same logic: start without a suspect, search everyone, then work backward.

In December 2025, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Kurtz that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their Google searches, though only three of seven justices joined the opinion, making it a plurality rather than binding precedent ^[11].

Colorado's Supreme Court went the other direction in 2023's People v. Seymour, finding a keyword warrant "constitutionally defective" but still admitting the evidence under the good faith exception ^[12].

No federal circuit has issued a definitive ruling. But whatever the Supreme Court says about geofence warrants in Chatrie will set the framework for keyword warrants too. Both tools treat the entire population as suspects first and filter later.

What's at Stake for You

If the Court greenlights geofence warrants:

Police nationwide get a template for demanding location data on every phone near any crime scene, any time
The precedent extends beyond Google to any company that tracks your location: Apple, wireless carriers, fitness trackers, connected cars
Every phone becomes a potential tracking device that can place you at a scene you had nothing to do with
The "third-party doctrine" gets stretched to cover continuous, granular location surveillance, gutting the privacy protections from Carpenter

If the Court strikes them down:

It's the biggest expansion of digital privacy rights since Carpenter in 2018
Police would need to identify a suspect before accessing their location data, the way warrants are supposed to work
The practical impact might be softened by Google's policy change, but the constitutional principle would protect against future surveillance tools

What You Can Do

Turn Off Location History

On Android: Settings → Location → Location Services → Google Location History → Turn off. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy → Location Services. Google's policy change helps, but turning it off yourself removes any ambiguity.

Review App Permissions

Check which apps have "always on" location access. Most don't need it. Weather apps, social media, shopping apps: set them to "While Using" or "Never."

Use Private Browsing for Searches

Reverse keyword warrants target search history. Use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, or search in a private/incognito window. Better yet: use Tor Browser for sensitive searches.

Watch the Case

Follow Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112) at SCOTUSblog. Oral arguments are expected this spring. The ruling will set the standard for digital surveillance for a generation.