When Bloomberg Law published this article, federal courts were divided over whether geofence warrants implicate the Fourth Amendment. On June 29, 2026, the US Supreme Court resolved that threshold question in Chatrie v. United States. In a 6–3 decision authored by Justice Kagan, the court held that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it compels Google to disclose a user’s location history through a geofence warrant.
The court’s decision largely embraces the privacy concerns discussed in the Bloomberg Law article. Relying on Carpenter v. United States, the court concluded that Google’s location history provides an even more comprehensive and revealing record of a person’s movements than the historical cell-site location information at issue in Carpenter. The court emphasized that location history records a user’s location approximately every two minutes, can pinpoint a device within roughly 20 meters, and may even identify the floor of a building the user occupies. As a result, the court held that individuals retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in this information despite its storage on Google’s servers. The court likewise rejected the government’s reliance on the third-party doctrine, concluding that ordinary use of smartphone applications and Google’s location services does not amount to voluntarily exposing this highly sensitive information to the government.
The court, however, stopped short of adopting the Fifth Circuit’s broader reasoning discussed in the Bloomberg Law article. In United States v. Smith, the Fifth Circuit concluded that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional as prohibited general warrants. The US Supreme Court declined to address that question. Instead, after concluding that obtaining Google location history constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, the court vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings to determine whether the multi-step geofence warrant at issue satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity at each stage of the search.
Accordingly, while Chatrie resolves the circuit split over whether geofence warrants trigger Fourth Amendment protections, it leaves unresolved the broader constitutional limits on their use. Lower courts must now determine what level of probable cause is required to justify searching the location data of numerous unidentified individuals, whether multi-step geofence warrants satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement, and when suppression is an appropriate remedy.
Although the Supreme Court did not declare geofence warrants per se unconstitutional, its decision represents a significant expansion of Fourth Amendment protections in the digital age. Going forward, law enforcement may no longer argue that obtaining Google location history falls outside the Fourth Amendment simply because the information is maintained by a third-party technology company. Instead, courts will be required to evaluate geofence warrants under traditional Fourth Amendment principles, ensuring continued judicial scrutiny of powerful digital investigative tools.
If you have any questions regarding the content of this alert, please contact Pei Pei Cheng de Castro, partner, at pdecastro@barclaydamon.com; Jennifer Hopkins, associate, at jhopkins@barclaydamon.com; or another member of the firm’s Commercial Litigation & Complex Trials or White Collar & Government Investigations Practice Areas.