Supreme Court rules privacy protections apply to cellphone location history

- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in 2018's *Carpenter v. United States*) that police generally need a warrant to obtain historical cellphone location data from a phone carrier — even though the company "owns" the records — because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their long-term movements. - This case, *Okello v. Chatrie*, tests whether the same logic applies to "geofence warrants": a tool where police ask Google for records of *every device* that was in a specific area at a specific time. The key question is whether requesting this data counts as a Fourth Amendment "search" requiring a warrant and probable cause. - The ruling described in this article appears to be at the Supreme Court level (January 2025), affirming that privacy protections extend to detailed location history. This has major implications for how police use big tech's location databases in investigations.