Supreme Court rules constitutional privacy protections apply to cellphone users' location history
The Supreme Court has ruled that cellphone users' location history is protected under constitutional privacy guarantees, a decision that limits how law enforcement can access that data. The ruling extends Fourth Amendment protections to a category of digital records that courts had long treated as fair game.
Why this matters: Your phone tracks where you sleep, where you worship, where you get medical care, and who you spend time with. For years, the government could get that history from carriers without a warrant, on the theory that you handed it over voluntarily by using a phone. That theory was always a fiction. This ruling treats location history as what it actually is: a detailed record of your private life. Police still have paths to this data. But now they have to go through a judge first, and that matters.
Who should care: Lawyers · Compliance · General readers · Privacy officers · Policy
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