In major privacy win, Supreme Court rules geofence warrants are protected by privacy rights

It’s not immediately clear how the ruling will affect past court cases. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

The ruling was not expected to change Chatrie’s sentence in his case as previous courts ruled that the evidence obtained from the geofence warrant was collected in good faith. Chatrie’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

The Supreme Court ruled that it is now up to the Appeals Court to decide whether the search warrant requested in the Chatrie case showed probable cause and thus was valid. 

Some companies that were frequently targeted with requests for location data, like Google, have begun storing users’ location data on their devices and not on their servers to stop handing over users’ data, prompting investigators to go to the users themselves. Other companies that store location data, such as Microsoft, Uber, and Yahoo, also receive geofence warrants on a regular basis.