Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that users generally lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in unprotected Google search records, underscoring how aggressively some courts are still applying third-party doctrine principles to digital data. Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 348 A.3d 133 (Pa. 2025) (our previous blog post on Kurtz is available here). The question of how much constitutional protection survives once a technology provider holds sensitive digital information is now before the United States Supreme Court in Chartie v. United States, No. 25-112, which heard arguments on April 27, 2026, on the question of whether a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
In Chatrie, police investigating a credit union robbery used a three-step geofence warrant process that led Google to produce anonymized device-location data for a defined place and time, then expanded location data for selected accounts, and finally subscriber information for a smaller subset, one of which pointed to the suspect, Chatrie. Chatrie argued in the lower courts that this is a digital version of the general warrants the Fourth Amendment was designed to forbid, whereas the government argued that users who enable location-history features voluntarily expose that data to a third party.
The most interesting part of the argument was not whether the Supreme Court will approve or reject geofence warrants across the board, but whether the Court may instead focus on how police move from a broad set of anonymous location data to a smaller set of identified users. In Chatrie, police first obtained anonymized device data for everyone in the area, then asked for more detailed location information for selected accounts and finally obtained subscriber information. Several justices appeared concerned that all of those steps were authorized in advance under a single warrant, without requiring police to return to a judge once they knew which devices they wanted to examine more closely.
A ruling for the government would push further in the direction suggested by cases like Kurtz, where sensitive data held by a provider is treated as something a user has voluntarily exposed. A narrower ruling, by contrast, could leave geofence warrants available in some form, but require clearer limits and renewed judicial approval before anonymous location data can be expanded or tied to a particular person. Either way, the case could shape how much privacy people retain when third parties store their movements and other revealing digital records.
