This Supreme Court case could redefine who owns your location data

You probably have Google’s Location History enabled right now. Or at least Google really wants you to. Apps like Google Maps constantly push users toward enabling location tracking to unlock “better experiences”: personalized recommendations, traffic predictions, trip timelines, automatic photo grouping, reminders about places you visited, and other convenience features that quietly depend on Google knowing where you are — and where you’ve been.

Although Location History is technically off by default, Google repeatedly prompts users to turn it on across Android setup screens and apps like Maps, Photos, and Assistant. Once enabled, it keeps collecting location data in the background, even when you are not actively using Google services. Over time, it builds an extremely detailed timeline of your movements, routines, and habits.

That timeline can reveal far more than many people realize: where you sleep, where you work, which clinics you visit, which bars you frequent, when you attend religious services, therapy appointments, or someone else’s apartment at 11 p.m.

Most users would probably consider that information deeply private. The US government, however, is now arguing otherwise. And that argument sits at the center of a major Supreme Court case that could reshape digital privacy in America

The case that can change how location data is seen

The case revolves around Okello Chatrie, who was seen on surveillance footage speaking on his cellphone while robbing the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on May 20, 2019. According to investigators, Chatrie entered the bank armed, threatened employees, and escaped with roughly $195,000 in cash.

Police had few leads, but they noticed him talking on the phone during the robbery. That detail led investigators to request a geofence warrant from Google. A geofence warrant is a type of warrant that forces the company to hand over location data for every device detected within a certain area during a certain timeframe. In this case, authorities requested data for all devices within roughly 150 meters of the bank during the robbery window. Privacy advocates supporting Chatrie later compared the search area to several football fields laid side by side — large enough to sweep in nearby homes, businesses, and even a church, not just the bank itself.

Google then searched through its Location History database and returned anonymized data tied to devices that had been inside the area. Investigators initially received information linked to 19 devices. From there, without obtaining additional warrants, police requested additional location history for selected devices over a longer time window to study their movements before and after the robbery. Eventually, authorities asked Google to fully de-anonymize three accounts.

One of them belonged to Okello Chatrie. Investigators later searched his home and reportedly found around $173,000 in cash, along with firearms and clothing connected to the robbery. The location data ultimately became one of the key pieces of evidence used in the case against him.

As of 2026, the case — Chatrie v. United States — is being debated at the US Supreme Court, which will decide whether these kinds of geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.

Private or not?

The US government’s position is essentially this: users voluntarily enabled Location History, voluntarily shared that data with Google, and therefore cannot expect it to stay private. Prosecutors also argue that location data reflects movements people made in public spaces anyway, so collecting those records is not the same as rummaging through someone’s house or personal diary. Privacy advocates and Chatrie’s legal team strongly disagree with that framing.

For starters, while Location History is technically optional, Google has spent years aggressively nudging users to enable it. During Android setup, inside Google Maps, Photos, Assistant, and other apps, users are repeatedly encouraged to turn it on in order to “improve” their experience or unlock certain features. Once enabled, the setting quietly expands across devices and services, continuously collecting location data in the background. Turning it back off is possible, but Google hardly makes that process obvious. Internal company messages cited in court filings even described parts of the interface as feeling designed to discourage people from figuring out how to fully disable tracking.

And then there is the bigger issue: just because something technically happens “in public” does not mean people expect the government and less so a private company like Google to build searchable historical records of it.

You may walk into a pharmacy in public. You may visit a therapist’s office, a casino, or someone else’s apartment building in public. That does not mean most people expect every one of those visits to be logged, stored for years, and later searchable by police through a giant corporate database.

For its part, Chatrie’s legal team argues that Location History is far more revealing than ordinary business records that the government compares it to. Over time, it can expose routines, relationships, political activities, medical concerns, religious beliefs, and countless other deeply personal details. And despite Google initially providing anonymized device IDs, privacy advocates argue that location data is notoriously easy to re-identify. A few location points are often enough to determine where someone lives, where they work, and ultimately who they are.

That concern is not theoretical. Court filings in the case note that Google itself has the ability to de-anonymize users internally. Researchers and privacy experts have also repeatedly demonstrated how supposedly anonymous location datasets can be linked back to real individuals using publicly available information.

In other words, the government is effectively arguing that one of the most sensitive forms of personal data people generate today should receive weaker constitutional protections simply because it happens to sit on Google’s servers instead of inside a filing cabinet at home.

Why it raises privacy concerns

Now let’s zoom out a bit and look at why geofence warrants worry privacy advocates far beyond this one robbery case.

The Fourth Amendment was written specifically to protect people against broad, suspicionless government searches. It states that warrants must be based on probable cause and must particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In simple terms, the government is supposed to know who or what it is looking for before it starts digging through private information.

Traditionally, investigators identified a suspect first and then sought permission to search that person’s property or records. Geofence warrants turned that logic entirely upside down. Police now first collect data on everyone present within a digital perimeter and only afterward narrow down potential suspects. In practice, these warrants quietly pull innocent people into investigations simply because their devices happened to be nearby. Residents, employees, customers, commuters, delivery workers, and passersby can all end up inside a law enforcement dragnet without ever knowing it.

And while authorities often describe the process as anonymous, location data is rarely anonymous in any meaningful sense. Movement patterns are deeply personal by nature. A few location points can often expose where someone lives, where they work, who they spend time with, and what places they regularly visit.

We already explored how revealing mobile location data can become in our article on Webloc and the hidden market for location intelligence. The same kinds of datasets collected for advertising, analytics, and app features have quietly fueled an entire industry built around tracking people’s movements, profiling behavior, and selling location intelligence to private companies and government agencies alike. Geofence warrants effectively tap into that same ecosystem. If you want a deeper look at how valuable and invasive location data has become, that story is well worth reading.

Treating this kind of information as fair game simply because it was uploaded to a cloud service risks normalizing a surveillance model where authorities can retrospectively map the movements of entire groups of people whenever they choose. And once systems like that exist, history suggests they rarely remain limited for long.

What begins as a tool for investigating serious crimes can gradually expand into broader forms of monitoring, especially once governments grow accustomed to having access to massive pools of behavioral data collected by private companies.

Google moved location history on device, but problem is still here

Partially in response to the growing backlash around geofence warrants and mass location tracking, in December 2023, the company said it would begin moving Location History data from the cloud directly onto users’ devices, with the transition rolling out throughout 2024. By July 2025, large-scale geofence searches against Google’s centralized Location History database were effectively no longer possible in the same form, simply because Google no longer stored everyone’s movement history together on its own servers.

That was undeniably a good thing for privacy. But the bigger problem did not magically disappear together with Google’s old cloud-based database.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, and other privacy groups warned in their Supreme Court filing supporting Chatrie, this case was never really just about Google. It is about the broader idea that companies can quietly accumulate enormous amounts of behavioral data on millions of people and that governments may later treat those databases as fair game for investigations.

Google is hardly the only company collecting location data. Countless apps, data brokers, advertising firms, telecom providers, and analytics companies still gather and monetize extremely detailed information about where people go and what they do. Entire industries now exist around buying, selling, analyzing, and sharing location intelligence.

That is exactly why this case matters so much even after Google changed its systems, and this is where the case stops being just about one robbery and starts becoming a much bigger fight over what “private” even means in the digital age.

What you can do

The uncomfortable reality is that modern smartphones are tracking machines by design. There is no magic switch that gives you every convenience feature without any privacy tradeoff.

That said, reducing how much location data gets collected in the first place still matters a lot.

If you do not actively use Google Maps Timeline or similar features, consider turning off Location History entirely and deleting old location records from your Google account. It is also worth reviewing which apps actually need constant access to your location and switching unnecessary permissions to “While Using the App” — or removing them altogether. In most cases, there is little reason to keep precise geolocation enabled all the time if you are not actively using navigation, maps, or location-based features at that moment. And more broadly, it is worth remembering that convenience features often quietly outlive the reasons you originally enabled them for.

The Supreme Court’s decision, expected later this summer, could end up affecting far more than just geofence warrants. The case may help decide how much privacy people actually have over sensitive digital data stored by companies like Google, and how easily governments can access it.