THE Supreme Court is to decide whether geofence warrants are constitutional, a case that Google has submitted an opinion on. The practice, described as a “reverse warrant,” gathers data about a broad group based on location and time, returning every device inside the area, not just those linked to a suspect, with proximity as the sole criterion.
In the Chatrie case, positioning data led to a warrant that included a hotel and a restaurant, and a 2019 Virginia armed bank robbery charge against Okello Chatrie was cited to illustrate how such warrants can sweep up people.
The CDT brief argues that the warrant process could expose the privacy of people engaging in lawful activity, and it notes that Google’s data collection has historically fed these warrants, with the company recording position data as frequently as every two minutes and storing it in a centralised database of hundreds of millions of accounts; Google later moved Timeline storage to devices in July 2025.
The case has featured numerous amicus briefs, with Google urging the justices to find geofence warrants unconstitutional because of their breadth, and oral arguments are due on 27 April. According to the Center for Democracy and Technology, the process can allow police to move from anonymised lists to targeted movement data and finally to subscriber-identifying information without further judicial approval.