Data Collection

Who Owns Your Data?

The Supreme Court could be poised to decide whether it's you or Big Tech companies.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 6.24.2026 10:04 AM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Illustration: Midjourney)

Can police get your digital information and make you a suspect just because you happened to be in a location at a given time or happened to search for certain terms online? The U.S. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next week.

The court must decide whether cops can use what are known as "geofence warrants"—requests for information on every phone that was in the vicinity of a crime scene or every person who used a search engine to look up a certain topic on a certain date. Geofence warrants let law enforcement go on fishing expeditions, obtaining data on numerous people without presenting probable cause against any one of them specifically or naming a specific person or device to be searched.

You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth's sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.

Comments

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Email(Required)

SUBSCRIBE

That runs counter to the Fourth Amendment, Okello Chatrie's lawyers argued in court in April. A broad swath of civil liberties groups agree.

The implications of this decision could go way beyond geofence warrants. At its core, this case is about who owns digital records like location history. Do you own your digital data? Or does it belong to the tech companies that store it?

It Starts With a Bank Robbery 

The case in question—Chatrie v. United States—was brought by Chatrie. He was convicted of bank robbery after police served Google with a geofence warrant, demanding that the company use its location history service records to find all devices that were within around 500 feet of the victimized bank within an hour of when the robbery took place.

That means the government sought information on an untold number of innocent people.

"After Google complied with that request, law enforcement sought and received additional location information for certain devices whose movements law enforcement deemed suspicious," Chatrie's petition to the Supreme Court noted. "Finally, without obtaining an additional search warrant, law enforcement requested and received names associated with three devices."

This sort of thing is not rare: "Google received its first geofence warrant in 2016" and "by 2021, geofence warrants constituted 25% of all warrants submitted to Google," according to Chatrie's petition.

The immediate question in this case is whether "geofence warrants" like the one used to nab Chatrie are constitutional. Chatrie's lawyers argue that they are not—that their use violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires warrants to "particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," based on probable cause. But lower courts have disagreed on the issue, making this a matter ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to tackle.

But It Doesn't End With a Bank Robbery

More than a dozen civil liberties groups have formally weighed in, mainly suggesting that geofence warrants are clearly unconstitutional. "The Fourth Amendment was forged in opposition to general warrants—warrants that lacked probable cause, failed to particularly describe their targets, or left the scope of the search to the officer's discretion," noted the nonprofit legal group Institute for Justice in a........

© Reason.com