From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo"
That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.
Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.
Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.
They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.
The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.
Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.
Most people don't understand how powerless police are to find criminals. That they catch them at all is often amazing. I have firsthand knowledge of this from a tragic loss in my family. The investigation was severely hindered because investigators could not utilize cell location data, despite knowing someone was present at the scene. Police spent an extensive amount of time trying to identify them without success. When the identity was eventually discovered through entirely different avenues, it confirmed the individual had a cell phone on them. The location data would have resolved the identification trivially. We should enable this capability and put strict "guardrails" on its use.
What's the difference between police looking up geofence data for the bank before and after a robbery to see who was there, and checking the bank's outdoor cameras to see what license plates were there?
One would be scope. There's a big difference between a security camera next to a secure facility (bank, police evidence facility, school) and a 1 mi radius circle around that facility. Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Another would be incentives. There's no reason to collect cell location data for everyone if you aren't able to use it for anything. I think just the fact that we are all monitored constantly is its own violation of our rights. We should have laws banning these practices.
Here's the text of the fourth amendment. Could you explain how "scope" and "incentives" are relevant distinguishing factors under that?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
As relevant here, there's two pieces. The threshold requirement is some sort of ownership. The right exists with respect to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Assuming digital data constitutes "papers," the accused has to show that it's "their" papers. The hypothetical you're responding to compares the bank's camera footage with the cell phone company's location information. Those seem indistinguishable for that prong.
You have a reasonable argument that "scope" and "incentives" are relevant to the second prong of what's "unreasonable." But you don't get there if you don't get past the first prong, right?
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.
>Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Given the ubiquity of security cameras they can just canvas local businesses and ask them to give it up. Given that warrants are involved, they can't even refuse.
A business can refuse a warrant, but it takes a legal response in court. Their attorneys need to convince a judge the warrant isn’t necessary - that it causes a bigger burden on them than the benefit to the public. Most businesses will just comply because it’s not in their interests to spend time and money on it.
Sometimes a business will challenge a court order if it’s about their own customers, employees, owners, or business dealings. The information requested should be relevant to the investigation, minimal to be helpful, and create as little burden on the business as is practical.
Also, if you’re not the subject of the investigation it’s often a subpoena rather than a warrant. There are major differences between these types of order in the US. A subpoena is an order to produce the evidence. A warrant is an order that allows law enforcement to seize it, using force if needed. As someone who has dealt with law enforcement requests for business data about customers quite a bit in the past, it’s often a simple request first and a subpoena otherwise.
Yes! That would be fantastic! They would need to approach many people, each having the ability to question the motivation! Or, they would need to convince a judge and obtain a warrant.
This is the disaggregation of power of surveillance.
The difference is ubiquitous surveillance, which is well known to lead to false positives and inhibits freedom and protest. A world where we are all under surveillance and people actually want to increase it is not a free world.
A bank's cameras cannot see into private spaces in unrelated buildings as is the explicit situation in this case where most of the people caught in the general dragnet were inside a church some distance away. And to be clearer, the data search is being done on the GPS recordings of personal property (not basestation multi-lateration records). This is the private space being searched. It's like if you carried around a journal and wrote down everywhere you went. Now the government is arguing they can draw arbitrary large general regions and read everyone's personal diary even in situations without any exigency.
>With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
There's a cynical joke in the refrigeration/hvac industry to the tune of "it's good for the environment as long as DuPont has a monopoly on it/the 3rd world isn't making it" in reference to refrigerants' reliable pattern of being identified as bad for the environment and get regulated away right as patents expire, manufacturing proliferates and they and the equipment that uses them become cheap.
Geofencing warrants and cell location data collection give me the same sort of "they're getting rid of it to move onto the next thing" vibes. Not that we shouldn't get rid of it.
I listened to the arguments, here's my notes live:
--
One justice asked petitioner that because 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
They continue to talk about the Terms of Service stating that Google will comply with legitimate government requests. And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc). Sotomayor points out that the government would need NO warrant to access these records.
The google feature doesn't exist anymore. But in the amicus brief some 30 providers still have features in similar pattern of record storage. 'Google can track you down to 3 feet'. Google had to search "500 million" accounts for the search in question.
Justice Jackson asks why they aren't looking at the case as a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'? The petitioner agrees, and points out that the data is protected by a password. So the data is NOT public.
"Data on the network is property." - how we get laws against stealing data/trespassing data
Probable Cause was an interesting argument. about 90 minutes in. It went by too quickly. The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'. The justice also sees the output of 3 people despite google 'searching' 19 people as the only people who matter.
Responder is leaning heavy into the 'consent' for google to store location history. Is it possible to turn location history off on modern android phones? Responder also argues that because you're in public AT SOME POINT, then your location data is no different than a cctv data pointing at the street. Then a justice interrupts to make the responder say that YES the government CAN perform these searches on anyone it wants any time it wants without a warrant. For example people who seek abortion, or were at a political event. And the responder agrees!
Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail, where location is different because people are 'constantly advertising' their location to google.
To me, the responder is arguing two things:
1. That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
2. Your location history stored in google (or others) are generated in public and are therefore don't require a warrant.
Responder says location records are records google creates on your phone. Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained? (idk, maybe because we have no way of knowing we were searched?)
> And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc).
You must have misheard this as this is not true country wide (see US v Warshak) and in practice the government treats these as needing a warrant because of that and the time requirement in the Stored Communications Act (and any major provider will explicitly refuse handing over content data without a warrant).
Gorsuch in particular thinks the Third Party Doctrine is bullshit and is happy to write that down (like in Carpenter) and today seemed to be trotting that out again (though I only read the beginning of arguments).
> The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'.
So a large apartment tower housing, I dunno, thousands, of families can entirely be searched because it's just "one place"? Chances are this even multiple buildings, so really more like a whole apartment complex. Sorry, someone in building 56 was maybe selling drugs, we're here to dig through your wardrobe even though you're in building 12 half a block away..."
They might as well apply for warrants as "Sol 3, Earth".
> As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
The cops say "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp". They can pretty much say this for any part of the town at any given time. A judge signs off on the warrant, because why wouldn't they? You don't get to challenge anything: no one is going to tell you "hey, your phone was in that area, come to the courthouse and make your case if you think the police shouldn't be given that info".
imo there should be a requirement for the gov to tell you within a reasonable time period (a year?) whenever a search warrant is granted for your data. currently there is no ability to check the government because you never learn that you were searched.
There's a nice map on Bluesky of what area of data Google is being asked to hand over. To be honest it's not actually huge. Personally though, that feels like not a great safeguard, not enough to make me ok with this. https://bsky.app/profile/audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app/post/3...
Worth noting that Google has changed its practice since 2019, supposedly, to keep location data on device, not accessible to them. However I have little doubt the cellphone carriers are also available to provide this data. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172204/google-maps-delet...
Governments rapidly turning data into a liability. Data is the new oil is out, data is the new toxic waste is in. The consumer sentiment continues to get worse and worse as it becomes clearer and clearer that we are being intruded upon at will. It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
> It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
There are many laws in place in EU which forbids many kind of practices which infringe on privacy, but the issue is that governments don't really enforce them proactively. And in some cases where they are the ones breaking them (e.g. by enacting law that is not compatible with EU Charter or ECHR) it will take long time to get judgement which forbids the practice.
Often the path is that you complain to DPA, you appeal to court, you appeal to higher court, (repeat last step X times), during court appeals you may need to wait for CJEU ruling and finally you might be able to file appeal to ECtHR.
In one "recent" case from Finland the original DPA decision was issued in 8/2020. I'm not sure how long this exact case took, but there are some recent decisions which took 5 years to issue. It was appealed to administrative court and court made request to CJEU on 11/2021. CJEU gave ruling on 6/2023. Administrative court gave ruling on 12/2023. It was appealed and higher administrative court gave ruling on 6/2025.
So it could take 10 years to annul an illegal law or practice.
I've been listening to this live and it's clear how Kavenaugh will vote regardless of the validity of the arguments. His mind is set and he's well into coming up with barely related hypotheticals introducing exigency into a case where there was none (the geofencing request for spying on a large group of people was done a week after the crime occured).
You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side. The text of the fourth amendment clearly connects the scope of privacy to property rights:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Cell location data belongs to AT&T and Verizon, not the accused individual. As to such third-party data, there's a general principle rooted in Roman law that third parties can be compelled to provide documents in their possession to aid a court proceeding: https://commerciallore.com/2015/06/04/a-brief-history-of-sub... ("In an early incarnation of mandatory minimum sentencing there were only two offences that automatically attracted the death penalty, treason and failing to answer a subpoena. Subpoenas as a tool of justice were considered so important that failing to answer it was a most egregious violation of civic duty. A person accused of murder may or may not be guilty, but if a person refused to answer a subpoena then they were seen as denying Jupiter’s justice itself.").
> You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side.
How about this part of the amendment?
> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable searches shall not be violated"
Isn't treating people like suspects (investigating them, searching their belongings, tracking them, etc.) merely because a third party claimed (and of course GPS is never inaccurate) that they passed within some vague proximity of a crime scene a violation of their security in their persons? Do you really have reasonable suspicion that every individual among the dozens (or more) you dragged into your search may have committed a crime if it's clear the others are there for unrelated reasons?
Ah, you're a bit confused about the case the court is hearing. This is explcitly not about telco basestation records. It is about the records for location data recorded on the smart phones of individuals. GPS recorded on their personal property, not multi-lateration from telco owned third party property. It's all very accessible if you give it a listen. It's streaming live on youtube.
I haven't heard the argument so maybe it's getting into that. But my understanding--based on a few articles--is that the case is (at least partly?) about geofencing information stored on Google's servers. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5777656/supreme-court-g...
"But after two months of working the case, all leads had gone dry. So police applied for a geofence warrant directed at Google and all its collected and stored cellphone location information.
A state magistrate judge found probable cause to issue the warrant and authorized the disclosure of Google's location information for an area the size of about three football fields around the Midlothian bank at the time of the robbery."
This is not about local storage. It's about location data gathered from apps and phone OS operators, which is much more akin to telco records than confiscating everyone's phone to look for evidence.
With parallel construction on the menu, this is largely academic. There is zero percent chance police and those who profit from their patronage will give up cell location sweeps.
You cannot do a parallel construction if the telecom operator refuses to share data with you in the first place. And if SCOTUS makes the right decision here they will have legal grounds to refuse.
From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo"
That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.
Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.
I think the trigger was this: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-hist...
Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.
They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
“Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.
I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.
The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.
Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Most people don't understand how powerless police are to find criminals. That they catch them at all is often amazing. I have firsthand knowledge of this from a tragic loss in my family. The investigation was severely hindered because investigators could not utilize cell location data, despite knowing someone was present at the scene. Police spent an extensive amount of time trying to identify them without success. When the identity was eventually discovered through entirely different avenues, it confirmed the individual had a cell phone on them. The location data would have resolved the identification trivially. We should enable this capability and put strict "guardrails" on its use.
What's the difference between police looking up geofence data for the bank before and after a robbery to see who was there, and checking the bank's outdoor cameras to see what license plates were there?
One would be scope. There's a big difference between a security camera next to a secure facility (bank, police evidence facility, school) and a 1 mi radius circle around that facility. Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Another would be incentives. There's no reason to collect cell location data for everyone if you aren't able to use it for anything. I think just the fact that we are all monitored constantly is its own violation of our rights. We should have laws banning these practices.
Here's the text of the fourth amendment. Could you explain how "scope" and "incentives" are relevant distinguishing factors under that?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
As relevant here, there's two pieces. The threshold requirement is some sort of ownership. The right exists with respect to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Assuming digital data constitutes "papers," the accused has to show that it's "their" papers. The hypothetical you're responding to compares the bank's camera footage with the cell phone company's location information. Those seem indistinguishable for that prong.
You have a reasonable argument that "scope" and "incentives" are relevant to the second prong of what's "unreasonable." But you don't get there if you don't get past the first prong, right?
Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
> The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law.
But the Supremacy Clause says the Constitution overrides Virginia law.
If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.
Or we can "keep acting" like there's no duly-constituted amendment process.
In the context of this thread, that would (ideally) fall under Congress’s purview, not the Supreme Court.
A majority-conservative Supreme Court's on an originalism kick, so we're very much stuck "when the sacred texts were written".
Only when it's the way they want to rule.
>Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Given the ubiquity of security cameras they can just canvas local businesses and ask them to give it up. Given that warrants are involved, they can't even refuse.
A business can refuse a warrant, but it takes a legal response in court. Their attorneys need to convince a judge the warrant isn’t necessary - that it causes a bigger burden on them than the benefit to the public. Most businesses will just comply because it’s not in their interests to spend time and money on it.
Sometimes a business will challenge a court order if it’s about their own customers, employees, owners, or business dealings. The information requested should be relevant to the investigation, minimal to be helpful, and create as little burden on the business as is practical.
Also, if you’re not the subject of the investigation it’s often a subpoena rather than a warrant. There are major differences between these types of order in the US. A subpoena is an order to produce the evidence. A warrant is an order that allows law enforcement to seize it, using force if needed. As someone who has dealt with law enforcement requests for business data about customers quite a bit in the past, it’s often a simple request first and a subpoena otherwise.
Yes! That would be fantastic! They would need to approach many people, each having the ability to question the motivation! Or, they would need to convince a judge and obtain a warrant.
This is the disaggregation of power of surveillance.
The difference is ubiquitous surveillance, which is well known to lead to false positives and inhibits freedom and protest. A world where we are all under surveillance and people actually want to increase it is not a free world.
A bank's cameras cannot see into private spaces in unrelated buildings as is the explicit situation in this case where most of the people caught in the general dragnet were inside a church some distance away. And to be clearer, the data search is being done on the GPS recordings of personal property (not basestation multi-lateration records). This is the private space being searched. It's like if you carried around a journal and wrote down everywhere you went. Now the government is arguing they can draw arbitrary large general regions and read everyone's personal diary even in situations without any exigency.
Well, one is a search and seizure of data about a great deal more people from a third party that is not the victim.
My biggest gripe is with the idea that any data shared with a third party is not subject to privacy.
With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
>With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
There's a cynical joke in the refrigeration/hvac industry to the tune of "it's good for the environment as long as DuPont has a monopoly on it/the 3rd world isn't making it" in reference to refrigerants' reliable pattern of being identified as bad for the environment and get regulated away right as patents expire, manufacturing proliferates and they and the equipment that uses them become cheap.
Geofencing warrants and cell location data collection give me the same sort of "they're getting rid of it to move onto the next thing" vibes. Not that we shouldn't get rid of it.
I listened to the arguments, here's my notes live: --
One justice asked petitioner that because 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
They continue to talk about the Terms of Service stating that Google will comply with legitimate government requests. And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc). Sotomayor points out that the government would need NO warrant to access these records.
The google feature doesn't exist anymore. But in the amicus brief some 30 providers still have features in similar pattern of record storage. 'Google can track you down to 3 feet'. Google had to search "500 million" accounts for the search in question.
Justice Jackson asks why they aren't looking at the case as a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'? The petitioner agrees, and points out that the data is protected by a password. So the data is NOT public.
"Data on the network is property." - how we get laws against stealing data/trespassing data
Probable Cause was an interesting argument. about 90 minutes in. It went by too quickly. The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'. The justice also sees the output of 3 people despite google 'searching' 19 people as the only people who matter.
Responder is leaning heavy into the 'consent' for google to store location history. Is it possible to turn location history off on modern android phones? Responder also argues that because you're in public AT SOME POINT, then your location data is no different than a cctv data pointing at the street. Then a justice interrupts to make the responder say that YES the government CAN perform these searches on anyone it wants any time it wants without a warrant. For example people who seek abortion, or were at a political event. And the responder agrees!
Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail, where location is different because people are 'constantly advertising' their location to google.
To me, the responder is arguing two things:
1. That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
2. Your location history stored in google (or others) are generated in public and are therefore don't require a warrant.
Responder says location records are records google creates on your phone. Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained? (idk, maybe because we have no way of knowing we were searched?)
> And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc).
You must have misheard this as this is not true country wide (see US v Warshak) and in practice the government treats these as needing a warrant because of that and the time requirement in the Stored Communications Act (and any major provider will explicitly refuse handing over content data without a warrant).
Gorsuch in particular thinks the Third Party Doctrine is bullshit and is happy to write that down (like in Carpenter) and today seemed to be trotting that out again (though I only read the beginning of arguments).
> The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'.
So a large apartment tower housing, I dunno, thousands, of families can entirely be searched because it's just "one place"? Chances are this even multiple buildings, so really more like a whole apartment complex. Sorry, someone in building 56 was maybe selling drugs, we're here to dig through your wardrobe even though you're in building 12 half a block away..."
They might as well apply for warrants as "Sol 3, Earth".
As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
As of now, most of these jurisdictions are a FLOCK search away, with absolutely no warrant, oversight, warrant, or anything. Like, all of these abominations https://maps.deflock.org/?lat=37.5620&lng=-77.4559&zoom=11.2...
> As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
The cops say "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp". They can pretty much say this for any part of the town at any given time. A judge signs off on the warrant, because why wouldn't they? You don't get to challenge anything: no one is going to tell you "hey, your phone was in that area, come to the courthouse and make your case if you think the police shouldn't be given that info".
imo there should be a requirement for the gov to tell you within a reasonable time period (a year?) whenever a search warrant is granted for your data. currently there is no ability to check the government because you never learn that you were searched.
There's a nice map on Bluesky of what area of data Google is being asked to hand over. To be honest it's not actually huge. Personally though, that feels like not a great safeguard, not enough to make me ok with this. https://bsky.app/profile/audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app/post/3...
Worth noting that Google has changed its practice since 2019, supposedly, to keep location data on device, not accessible to them. However I have little doubt the cellphone carriers are also available to provide this data. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172204/google-maps-delet...
Governments rapidly turning data into a liability. Data is the new oil is out, data is the new toxic waste is in. The consumer sentiment continues to get worse and worse as it becomes clearer and clearer that we are being intruded upon at will. It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
> It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
There are many laws in place in EU which forbids many kind of practices which infringe on privacy, but the issue is that governments don't really enforce them proactively. And in some cases where they are the ones breaking them (e.g. by enacting law that is not compatible with EU Charter or ECHR) it will take long time to get judgement which forbids the practice.
Often the path is that you complain to DPA, you appeal to court, you appeal to higher court, (repeat last step X times), during court appeals you may need to wait for CJEU ruling and finally you might be able to file appeal to ECtHR.
In one "recent" case from Finland the original DPA decision was issued in 8/2020. I'm not sure how long this exact case took, but there are some recent decisions which took 5 years to issue. It was appealed to administrative court and court made request to CJEU on 11/2021. CJEU gave ruling on 6/2023. Administrative court gave ruling on 12/2023. It was appealed and higher administrative court gave ruling on 6/2025.
So it could take 10 years to annul an illegal law or practice.
I've been listening to this live and it's clear how Kavenaugh will vote regardless of the validity of the arguments. His mind is set and he's well into coming up with barely related hypotheticals introducing exigency into a case where there was none (the geofencing request for spying on a large group of people was done a week after the crime occured).
SCOTUS has been this way for a while now.
They start with the desired decision and work backwards to justify it.
Or they refuse to hear cases that they know will go the way they don't want.
You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side. The text of the fourth amendment clearly connects the scope of privacy to property rights:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Cell location data belongs to AT&T and Verizon, not the accused individual. As to such third-party data, there's a general principle rooted in Roman law that third parties can be compelled to provide documents in their possession to aid a court proceeding: https://commerciallore.com/2015/06/04/a-brief-history-of-sub... ("In an early incarnation of mandatory minimum sentencing there were only two offences that automatically attracted the death penalty, treason and failing to answer a subpoena. Subpoenas as a tool of justice were considered so important that failing to answer it was a most egregious violation of civic duty. A person accused of murder may or may not be guilty, but if a person refused to answer a subpoena then they were seen as denying Jupiter’s justice itself.").
Those principles were incorporated into what's called the third-party doctrine half a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine. But by then it was already an ancient principle.
> You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side.
How about this part of the amendment?
> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable searches shall not be violated"
Isn't treating people like suspects (investigating them, searching their belongings, tracking them, etc.) merely because a third party claimed (and of course GPS is never inaccurate) that they passed within some vague proximity of a crime scene a violation of their security in their persons? Do you really have reasonable suspicion that every individual among the dozens (or more) you dragged into your search may have committed a crime if it's clear the others are there for unrelated reasons?
Well this court has never overturned decisions made 50 years ago.
Ah, you're a bit confused about the case the court is hearing. This is explcitly not about telco basestation records. It is about the records for location data recorded on the smart phones of individuals. GPS recorded on their personal property, not multi-lateration from telco owned third party property. It's all very accessible if you give it a listen. It's streaming live on youtube.
I haven't heard the argument so maybe it's getting into that. But my understanding--based on a few articles--is that the case is (at least partly?) about geofencing information stored on Google's servers. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5777656/supreme-court-g...
"But after two months of working the case, all leads had gone dry. So police applied for a geofence warrant directed at Google and all its collected and stored cellphone location information.
A state magistrate judge found probable cause to issue the warrant and authorized the disclosure of Google's location information for an area the size of about three football fields around the Midlothian bank at the time of the robbery."
This is not about local storage. It's about location data gathered from apps and phone OS operators, which is much more akin to telco records than confiscating everyone's phone to look for evidence.
> there's a general principle rooted in Roman law
There goes my fucking morning :P
if geofencing for all people in the area of a crime becomes legal
well then we know everyone who went to Epstein Island from their cellphone records
Congress must subpoena them ALL
especially the one that went all the way back to Trump Tower, who was it?
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-visitor-t...
With parallel construction on the menu, this is largely academic. There is zero percent chance police and those who profit from their patronage will give up cell location sweeps.
You cannot do a parallel construction if the telecom operator refuses to share data with you in the first place. And if SCOTUS makes the right decision here they will have legal grounds to refuse.