Think your cellphone data is protected without a search warrant? Think again.

One bright spot in an otherwise dismal Supreme Court term was a big Fourth Amendment decision last week that forbade police from harvesting cellphone location data.  

In recent years, police have been using the practice of geofencing, where they demand that Google or phone companies provide information about every cellphone present at a particular time and location. In last week’s Chatrie v. U.S. decision, the court ruled that police first need to get a warrant if they want to gobble up cellphone location history.  

The Chatrie decision protects individual privacy and is a welcome development. Perhaps eager to make good news into great news, a number of commentators and legal scholars have suggested that it signals a huge shift in Fourth Amendment doctrine. Speculation is rampant that the court is going to drastically expand protection for cellphones and digital data.  

Not so fast. We have seen this movie before, and the original version ended with a whimper, not a bang.   

Way back in 2014, the Supreme Court decided a supposedly huge cellphone privacy case called Riley v. California. Police had been conducting warrantless cellphone searches under something called the Search Incident To Arrest exception, which allowed police to search all items on a person in order to prevent them from grabbing a weapon or destroying evidence. Police claimed that cellphones were just like purses or wallets, and that they were therefore entitled to search phones without a........

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