Can Police Track Your Phone Without Warrant? Supreme Court To Decide On Location Data

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on a case that asks whether law enforcement is required to obtain a probable-cause court warrant to access a person’s cellular location data.

The case deals with the common practice by police of obtaining location information from cell towers without a warrant. That information is often used to pinpoint an individual’s location by tracking a phone's pings from towers. The information often is used as evidence.

Read: Police Using Stingray Cell Phone Surveillance Would Be Required To Obtain Warrant Under New House Bill

“Because cell phone location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said in a statement.

“The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the longstanding protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records.”

In the case that will come before the high court, the authorities obtained 127 days worth of cell-site data that included 12,898 location points. That information was used to convict a robbery suspect in Detroit

Timothy Carpenter, the suspect in the case, was convicted on six counts of robbery after police combed through a month’s worth of location points collected by cell towers and placed him near storefronts where armed robberies occurred, including at a Radio Shack and a T-Mobile store.

Read: NSA FISA Metadata Surveillance: Is The Government Using Cell Phones To Gather Location Data?

Carpenter appealed the decision, contending a warrant should be required to obtain the data used to convict him. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rejected Carpenter’s appeal on the grounds that phone companies must disclose data to law enforcement if it is believed to be “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The law that allows the government and law enforcement to demand companies provide such information is known as the third-party doctrine laid out by a controversial statute called the Stored Communications Act.

Under the theory, cell-site data is considered a standard business record, which telecommunications companies are required to disclose in investigations, even without a warrant.

The statue was also used to justify the U.S. National Security Agency’s practice of collecting telephone communications metadata, which was revealed by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor previously has said the third-party doctrine is "ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."

"Given the increasing use of new forms of electronic surveillance, it's important now more than ever that the Supreme Court steps in to push back against police overreach and clarify the protections of the Fourth Amendment," Harold Gurewitz, an attorney who represents Carpenter, wrote in a petition to the court.