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Obtaining CSLI records is a fairly common law enforcement tool and—until now—such information could typically be obtained by court orders issued under the Stored Communications Act. This evidence was used to help convict Carpenter of various robbery charges. Do customers have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their location information when, through their phones, they disclose that information to cellular providers?
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As such, it argued that CSLI records should be treated the same way as phone records in the hands of a telephone company or bank records in the hands of a financial institution—both of which the Supreme Court has held can be obtained through a subpoena and without a warrant. The Court ruled for Carpenter, holding that individuals have a legitimate expectation of privacy in their locations as captured by CSLI.
U.S. Supreme Court Rules That Location Information Is Protected by the Fourth Amendment
As such, a warrant based on probable cause is required in order to obtain these records. The opinion made several key observations:. Most obviously, in light of Carpenter , a mobile communications provider should ask to see a warrant if the government requests historical CSLI covering a period of a week or more.
And, undoubtedly, law enforcement agencies will be updating their protocols accordingly.
U.S. Supreme Court requires warrants for cellphone location data : GPS World
Slightly less obviously, businesses that possess other types of customer location information e. While the ruling will create some uncertainty, service providers can take some comfort in the fact that the Stored Communications Act precludes plaintiffs from suing providers who comply with court orders or subpoenas. So businesses are unlikely to be successfully sued simply for having complied with a subpoena or court order requesting this type of information.
More broadly, Carpenter continues a trend of recent Supreme Court cases adapting Fourth Amendment rules to account for changing technology. A key refrain throughout the opinion is the ease of compiling CSLI records and the sheer volume of data at stake. If you would like to learn how Lexology can drive your content marketing strategy forward, please email enquiries lexology.
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U.S. Supreme Court to Consider Whether the Fourth Amendment Protects Cell-Location Data
My saved default Read later Folders shared with you. Register now for your free, tailored, daily legal newsfeed service. As Bloomberg notes , this ruling comes in favor of Timothy Ivory Carpenter, who argued that prosecuting attorneys violated the Constitution after obtaining four months of location data, which showed he was near where armed robberies had taken place. This case first came to light back in when Carpenter was convicted of multiple armed robberies and was sentenced to years in prison.
The verdict was made after the prosecution obtained Carpenter's cell-location data via the Stored Communications Act , not a warrant. Last June , the Supreme Court announced that it'd hear this case during its next session, which began in October.
The court's opinion is that cellphone location data doesn't fit "neatly" under existing precedents, and instead occupies a space at the intersection of reasonable expectation of privacy for one's location and movements, and what type of information a person keeps to themselves and what's shared with others.
A previous case about tax evasion ruled that the bank documents and records of an individual weren't private, they were instead documents created in an ordinary course of business for the bank, a third-party.
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Therefore, those documents -- produced by a third party -- weren't under protection from the Fourth Amendment. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user's claim to Fourth Amendment protection The location information obtained from Carpenter's wireless carriers was the product of a search. The ruling will not have an impact on the police's ability to track someone in realtime using cell data, with Roberts specifically mentioning fleeing suspects, "protecting individuals who are threatened with imminent harm" and preventing "imminent" destruction of evidence in the opinion.
