Chatrie Is a Privacy Decision

The Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States on June 29. Call it what it is. A privacy decision.

The case came from a bank robbery. The question the Court answered has almost nothing to do with the crime. It answered a narrower thing than the headlines suggest, and the narrowness is the point.

Police used a geofence warrant. They told Google to hand over every phone near the credit union during a two-hour window. Google searched hundreds of millions of accounts to do it. The question was whether that is a search under the Fourth Amendment.

The Court said yes. It is a search. Justice Kagan wrote for a 6-3 majority. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your phone's location history, she held, even when Google holds it for you. That is constitutional language. That is the Fourth Amendment speaking.

Be precise about what the Court did not decide. It did not rule that this warrant was invalid. It did not hold that geofence warrants are unconstitutional. It sent the harder questions, probable cause and particularity, back to the lower court. The Court decided the threshold question and left the rest for another day.

That threshold still matters to every American, not just those accused of something. Here is why it reaches past the courtroom.

Privacy rights in this country come from two places. One is constitutional. The Fourth Amendment. It limits the government. The other is civil. State privacy statutes, FTC enforcement, the privacy frameworks spreading across the states. They govern how private companies handle your data.

These two are not strangers. They inform each other. When the Court says your location is private, that it is yours, that the government cannot take it without cause tied to you, it validates every civil law built on the same premise. California said it first in the CCPA. Nevada followed. More than a dozen states now give residents rights over location data held by private companies.

Data brokers sell that same data today. They sell it to anyone who pays. That included, until recently, law enforcement trying to skip the warrant. Chatrie speaks to that circle even as it leaves the edges for later.

The constitutional value and the civil value are one value. Your location is sensitive. It shows where you worship. Who your doctor is. Where your children go to school. Who you spend your nights with. No company and no government should hold that without your consent or a court's approval.

One footnote worth reading. Google changed how it stores Location History in July 2025. It did it so it can no longer answer this kind of warrant. The exact technology at the center of the case is already fading. The principle the case sets down is not.

This is not a criminal decision that happens to mention privacy. It is a privacy decision that came from a criminal matter. The distinction holds. The protection runs in every direction.