Much like carrying a cellphone is part of modern life, so is allowing a third party to track your movements, and that doesn’t diminish a person’s right to privacy, the majority ruled. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that “even short-term monitoring” of where a person has been can reveal “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations”—particularly if he’s seen visiting a sensitive location, like a clinic, an attorney’s office, or a strip club.
“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote.
Privacy advocates cheered the ruling, even though it “stopped short of striking down these warrants as inherently unconstitutional,” the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Andrew Crocker, said in a statement provided to Ars.
“We applaud the Court’s decision,” Crocker said. “The Court reaffirmed that you have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and that even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment.”
Tech companies also moved to support the ruling. Matt Schruers is CEO of a trade association that counts Google and Apple among members, the Computer & Communications Industry Association. In a statement, he celebrated the ruling for clarifying that “the Fourth Amendment fully protects people’s rights to privacy from government intrusion.”
“We are encouraged to see the Court recognize that privacy interests persist regardless of the technology involved, and that law enforcement must seek judicial authorization to obtain Americans’ geolocation information,” Schruers said.
Dissent argued for app-by-app basis
Most justices agreed that a common standard that the Fourth Amendment applies to all location history was necessary to avoid future court battles that could potentially draw different lines between different apps and phone features.
