{"id":510,"date":"2026-08-13T22:36:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T22:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=510"},"modified":"2026-08-13T22:36:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T22:36:13","slug":"the-supreme-court-expands-protections-for-digital-data-now-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=510","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court expands protections for digital data \u2013 now what?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Please note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not\u00a0necessarily\u00a0reflect the opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump administration asks SCOTUS to rule soon on mail-in voting<\/a><\/p>\n

This term, in Chatrie v. United States<\/em>, the Supreme Court recognized one\u2019s digital location as firmly protected by the Constitution from police searches without a warrant. Beyond its particular context,<\/em> Chatrie<\/em> also opens the door to a major expansion of digital privacy under the Fourth Amendment. But the nature and extent of this privacy is far from certain.<\/p>\n

Where digital location data stood<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before this summer, certain kinds of digital location data were already protected. In 2018\u2019s Carpenter v. United States<\/em>, the court held that police needed to get a warrant before reviewing at least seven days\u2019 worth of a certain kind of digital location data – cell-site location information. Cell phone providers collect CSLI when cell phones connect to cell towers, and it can provide an estimate of a user\u2019s location somewhere within one-eighth to four square miles. This kind of information can be useful to police in, for instance, placing suspects at the locations of crimes.<\/p>\n

In Carpenter<\/em>, the court held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy (and therefore Fourth Amendment protections) in at least seven days\u2019 worth of this data because, for one, such location data is particularly revealing of the privacies of life, as it tracks a person\u2019s movements both extensively and into private areas. Such information was also revealing, according to the court, since the volume of CSLI far outstripped past police capacity to track individuals, and given that police could retrospectively delve into any cell phone carriers\u2019 past, regardless of whether the police had earlier identified them as a suspect worth devoting resources to tracking. Additionally, the court found that phone users\u2019 generation of CSLI was involuntary: carrying a cell phone is inescapable in modern life and one\u2019s phone automatically generates this data, not through any active choice on the user\u2019s part. (One commenter has termed these facets the ).<\/p>\n

Chatrie<\/em>: Carpenter<\/em> redux<\/strong><\/p>\n

The court\u2019s holding in Carpenter<\/em> was fairly hedged, however. Was digital location data of this kind spanning less than seven days protected? What about data generated from some kind of interaction with a user, rather than data generated automatically by one\u2019s phone?<\/p>\n

Enter Chatrie v. United States.<\/em> The case dealt with exactly those questions, and the court answered them with a resounding affirmation of location data\u2019s protections. Specifically, Chatrie<\/em> involved police constructing a \u201cgeofence\u201d \u2013 a virtual perimeter of sorts \u2013 and requesting data from companies about all cell phones located within that perimeter, from which the police ultimately can identify suspects. The particular kind of data requested in the Chatrie<\/em> geofence involved information collected by a Google service called \u201clocation history.\u201d This service records the location of a user\u2019s cell phone more frequently and more precisely than CSLI.<\/p>\n

This feature also allows for data to be collected on the scale of hours, rather than days, and involves data generated through a process with arguably more interaction from the user than in Carpenter<\/em>: users opt-in, with varied degrees of awareness, for their location to be tracked.<\/p>\n

Despite these differences, the court concluded that this type of data should be treated similarly to that in Carpenter<\/em>, emphasizing that its precision was actually more revealing than CSLI, even with only a very short window of collection. The court also focused on the data\u2019s retrospective nature: any officer could reconstruct the movements of any individual in both public and private spaces at the click of a button. The court thus concluded that one had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their digital location history.<\/p>\n

Power to the people?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps the court\u2019s most surprising move, however, was to characterize this kind of digital location data as belonging to the user. The majority described this data as a record the user \u201cviews as his own\u201d because users use this data as \u201ca personal journal\u201d of what restaurants they visited, what they saw on vacation, when they were at a friend\u2019s house, and much more. In contrast, cell phone users generally \u201chave no awareness of CSLI records.\u201d In the majority\u2019s eyes, this distinction made the case for protecting location history data even stronger than the data reviewed in Carpenter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So why is such a characterization surprising? Because of a background rule known as the third-party doctrine. This doctrine holds that a person loses a reasonable expectation of privacy in records they share with a third party, such as phone numbers or bank records.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump administration urges Supreme Court to issue a decision in mail-in voting dispute<\/a><\/p>\n

In Carpenter<\/em>, the Supreme Court carved CSLI out from that doctrine, finding that such information was not voluntarily shared by cell phone users with the cell phone companies.<\/p>\n

In Chatrie, <\/em>however, the government argued that users do<\/em> voluntarily share this information, because they arguably opt-in to Google location history. Nevertheless, the court dismissed this distinction: \u201cA cell-phone user is not to be viewed as [voluntarily] sharing private information with third parties . . . just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,\u201d with location-tracking apps among those normal things.<\/p>\n

This wholesale exemption of a broad swath of records from the third-party doctrine raises significant implications for other technologies. For example, Chatrie<\/em>\u2019s logic offers a clear basis for requiring warrants before accessing AI chat logs. Although these records are turned over to a third party, they are certainly as or more intimate as a list of past-visited locations.<\/p>\n

But this decision also leaves a great deal of gray: is one\u2019s fitness data as revelatory as one\u2019s location? Does the third-party exemption only count for cell-phone-generated data, meaning if I generate the same information on a stationary computer I lose my expectation of privacy? The court offers little guidance on figuring out which records are \u201cours\u201d enough to count as retaining a reasonable expectation of privacy.<\/p>\n

Automatic license plate readers may prove to be the most interesting area of Carpenter-Chatrie<\/em> litigation. ALPR cameras, like Flock, collect a record of a car\u2019s location, store it, and allow it to be accessed retrospectively. Arguably, this information is revelatory: it can reveal information about when and where you\u2019ve gone. And although collection is contemporaneous, searching ALPR databases is retrospective. Given Chatrie<\/em>\u2019s reliance on these two factors, there\u2019s a strong argument to be made that such database queries now require a warrant. But prosecutors may (and likely will) counter: ALPRs only capture public<\/em> locations, which the Chatrie<\/em> court went out of its way to distinguish. How far Chatrie<\/em>\u2019s logic will stretch (whether on how \u201cprivate\u201d one\u2019s data is or the voluntariness of surrendering this), and which factors emerge as the most important, thus very much remain to be decided.<\/p>\n

To make matters even more complicated, in Chatrie <\/em>itself the court punted a huge question back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. It instructed that court to consider whether the actual legal process used in that case \u2013 a three-step dance between Google and the police in which Google reveals increasingly more information in response to increasingly developed police suspicion \u2013 is constitutionally sound. The process, designed by Google, goes as follows: First, after receiving the geofence coordinates and timeframe from the police, Google provides anonymized location data for cell phones present at the designated place and time. Second, the police narrow down the list and request additional information \u2013 typically for the same data over a longer period of time \u2013 about the remaining entries. Google responds. Finally, the police request the identities of an even smaller subset of that list, using other investigative tactics to narrow their request. (Because Google now stores location history locally on a user’s phone, it can no longer respond to such requests with respect to this kind of data. But this general process continues to be used across companies and law enforcement agencies for other kinds of information.)<\/p>\n

As I wrote in my Chatrie<\/em> preview, a lot rides on whether this kind of process is constitutionally reasonable. This kind of search \u2013 called a reverse search \u2013 is likely only possible through some set of procedures like Google\u2019s. Critics argue that the process lacks one of the foundational requirements of constitutional searches, particularity, which means that the police must present sufficient information about who and what they seek. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, for instance, spent her concurrence laying out this argument. Ruling the process unconstitutional on this basis might effectively outlaw reverse searches. So although Chatrie<\/em> confirmed that the police need a warrant to access this information, it is not yet settled what kind of warrant is necessary here, as is whether this kind of search can continue at all.<\/p>\n

We may be back in the Supreme Court with this question \u2013 and a whole host of others \u2013 in the relatively near future.<\/p>\n

Read more SCOTUS has issued its decisions. Now Congress has the floor.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not\u00a0necessarily\u00a0reflect the opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff. Read more Trump administration asks SCOTUS to rule soon on mail-in voting This term, in Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized one\u2019s digital location as firmly protected by the Constitution from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-scotus-outside-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court expands protections for digital data \u2013 now what? - American Service Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=510\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court expands protections for digital data \u2013 now what? - American Service Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Please note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not\u00a0necessarily\u00a0reflect the opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff. 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