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In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Chatrie v. United States, the Open Technology Institute (OTI), a ¹ú²úÊÓƵ program promoting equitable access to digital technology and its benefits, issued the following statement from Prem M. Trivedi, director of ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s Open Technology Institute.

It has long been common sense that the rich location data that our smartphones and other devices generate should be entitled to the clear protection of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Today, Justice Kagan’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States goes a long way toward aligning common sense with doctrinal reality. The Court rightly held that police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location history from Google via a geofence warrant because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell-phone location information.

This simply makes sense. Our phones’ location histories reveal not just where we are at any given moment, but can render legible our participations in protest, uncommon meetings, access to health care, and many other activities and associations. The government’s ability to get location information from third parties like Google or Apple without a warrant violates our visceral understanding of what the Fourth Amendment and fairness mean. Today’s opinion realigns the law with this basic privacy intuition. There are other areas—chief among them the data broker loophole—where a similar alignment is urgently needed. OTI has long supported the bipartisan Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, legislation that would ban the government from buying information that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.