Supreme Court says constitution protects people's location data

- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment (protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures) generally requires police to get a warrant before accessing a person's historical cell phone location data from their wireless carrier. - This reverses the "third-party doctrine" — a legal principle that said if you voluntarily give information to a company (like a phone company), you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and the government can access it without a warrant. - The case is *Carpenter v. United States* (2018). The court held that tracking someone's location over days or weeks reveals private details about their "family, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations" — and people don't voluntarily expose that just by using a cell phone. - This was a major win for digital privacy advocates, as location data had long been treated as a business record with little constitutional protection. However, the ruling is narrow: it applies only to **historical** cell-site records, not real-time tracking, not other third-party data (like bank records), and not data shared with a "friend" through an app.