United States v. Okello Chatrie ( 2024 )

USCA4 Appeal: 22-4489 Doc: 63 Filed: 07/09/2024 Pg: 1 of 103
PUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 22-4489
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff – Appellee,
v.
OKELLO T. CHATRIE,
Defendant – Appellant.
--------------------------------
THE REPORTERS COMMITTEE FOR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS;
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION; AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES
UNION OF VIRGINIA; EIGHT FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER OFFICES
WITHIN THE FOURTH CIRCUIT; TECHNOLOGY LAW AND POLICY
CLINIC AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW; ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER FOUNDATION,
Amici Supporting Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, at
Richmond. M. Hannah Lauck, District Judge. (3:19-cr-00130-MHL-1)
Argued: December 8, 2023 Decided: July 9, 2024
Before WILKINSON, WYNN, and RICHARDSON, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Richardson wrote the opinion, in which Judge
Wilkinson joined. Judge Wynn wrote a dissenting opinion.
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ARGUED: Michael William Price, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL
DEFENSE LAWYERS, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Nathan Paul Judish, UNITED
STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Appellee. ON BRIEF:
Geremy C. Kamens, Federal Public Defender, Alexandria, Virginia, Laura J. Koenig,
Assistant Federal Public Defender, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER,
Richmond, Virginia, for Appellant. Kenneth A. Polite, Jr., Assistant Attorney General,
Richard W. Downing, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Computer Crime and
Intellectual Property Section, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE,
Washington, D.C.; Jessica D. Aber, United States Attorney, Kenneth R. Simon, Jr.,
Assistant United States Attorney, Peter S. Duffey, Assistant United States Attorney,
OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellee.
Jennifer Lynch, Andrew Crocker, Hannah Zhao, ELECTRONIC FRONTIER
FOUNDATION, San Francisco, California; Jacob M. Karr, Technology Law and Policy
Clinic, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW, New York, New York, for Amici
Technology Law and Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law and Electronic
Frontier Foundation. Jennifer Stisa Granick, San Francisco, California, Nathan Freed
Wessler, Ashley Gorski, Patrick Toomey, Brandon Buskey, Trisha Trigilio, Laura Moraff,
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION FOUNDATION, New York, New York; Eden
B. Heilman, Matthew W. Callahan, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
FOUNDATION OF VIRGINIA, Richmond, Virginia; William F. Nettles, IV, Federal
Public Defender, Columbia, South Carolina, G. Alan DuBois, Federal Public Defender,
Raleigh, North Carolina, Louis Allen, Federal Public Defender, Greensboro, North
Carolina, Juval O. Scott, Federal Public Defender, Roanoke, Virginia, Brian J. Kornbrath,
Federal Public Defender, Clarksburg, West Virginia, James Wyda, Federal Public
Defender, Baltimore, Maryland, Wesley P. Page, Federal Public Defender, OFFICE OF
THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Charleston, West Virginia; John Baker, Federal
Public Defender, FEDERAL DEFENDERS OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, INC.,
Charlotte, North Carolina, for Amici American Civil Liberties Union, American Civil
Liberties Union of Virginia, and Eight Federal Public Defender Offices Within the Fourth
Circuit. Bruce D. Brown, Katie Townsend, Gabe Rottman, Grayson Clary, Emily Hockett,
REPORTERS COMMITTEE FOR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, Washington, D.C., for
Amicus Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
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RICHARDSON, Circuit Judge:
Okello Chatrie appeals the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress location
data obtained using a geofence warrant. He argues that the geofence warrant violated the
Fourth Amendment because it lacked probable cause and particularity. But we find that
the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained two hours’
worth of Chatrie’s location information, since he voluntarily exposed this information to
Google. We therefore affirm the district court.
I. Background
This case involves government access to a specialized form of location information
maintained by Google. Understanding the nature of this information, how it is generated,
and how Google obtains it is necessary to our disposition. Accordingly, we begin with a
description of the relevant technology. 1
A. Google Location History and Geofence Warrants
Few readers need an introduction to Google, the technology supergiant that offers
products and services like Android, Chrome, Google Search, Maps, Drive, and Gmail. This
case, however, is about a particular setting for mobile devices that Google calls “Location
History.”
1
After we held argument for this case, Google announced changes to its Location
History setting. See Marlo McGriff, Updates to Location History and New Controls
Coming Soon to Maps, Google (Dec. 12, 2023),
https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-history-and-new-controls-coming-
soon-to-maps/ [https://perma.cc/Y62G-GBUW]. In this opinion, we describe Location
History as the record reflects that it existed when the government obtained Chatrie’s
information in 2019. We do not opine on how Google’s changes will affect future cases.
3
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Location History is an optional account setting that allows Google to track a user’s
location while he carries his mobile devices. If a user opts in, Google keeps a digital log
of his movements and stores this data on its servers. Google describes this setting as
“primarily for the user’s own use and benefit.” J.A. 131. And enabling it does unlock
several useful features for a user. For instance, he can view a “virtual journal” of his past
travels in the “Timeline” feature of the Google Maps app. J.A. 128. He can also obtain
personalized maps and recommendations, find his phone if he loses it, and receive real-
time traffic updates. But Google uses and benefits from a user opting in, too—mostly in
the form of advertising revenue. Google uses Location History to show businesses whether
people who viewed an advertisement visited their stores. It similarly allows businesses to
send targeted advertisements to people in their stores’ proximity.
Location History is turned off by default, so a user must take several affirmative
steps before Google begins tracking and storing his Location History data. First, he must
enable location sharing on his mobile device. 2 Second, he must opt in to the Location
History setting on his Google account, either through an internet browser, a Google
application (such as Google Maps), or his device settings (for Android devices). Before
he can activate the setting, however, Google always presents him language that explains
the basics of the service. 3 Third, he must enable the “Location Reporting” feature on his
2
For iOS devices, he must also grant location permission to applications capable of
using that information.
3
This text is the same no matter how a user opts in to Location History. It explains
that Location History “[s]aves where you go with your devices,” and that “[t]his data may
(Continued)
4
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mobile device. 4 And fourth, he must sign in to his Google account on that device. Only
when a user follows these steps will Google begin tracking and storing his Location History
data. Roughly one-third of active Google users have enabled Location History.
Even after a user opts in, he maintains some control over his location data. He can
review, edit, or delete any information that Google has already obtained. So, for instance,
he could decide he only wants to keep data for certain dates and to delete the rest. Or he
could decide to delete everything. Google also allows him to pause (i.e., disable) the
collection of future Location History data. 5 Whatever his choice, Google will honor it.
From start to finish, then, the user controls how much Google tracks and stores his Location
History data.
Once a user enables Location History, Google constantly monitors his location
through GPS, even when he isn’t using his phone. 6 And if he has an Android phone, he
be saved and used in any Google service where you were signed in to give you more
personalized experiences. You can see your data, delete it and change it in your settings at
account.google.com.” J.A. 1564. It also presents an expansion arrow, which, if tapped by
the user, displays more information about Location History. For instance, it explains that
“Google regularly obtains location data from your devices . . . even when you aren’t using
a specific Google service.” J.A. 1565.
4
Location Reporting allows a user to control which devices in particular will
generate Location History information. So a user could enable Location History at the
account level but then disable Location Reporting for a particular device. That device then
would not generate Location History data.
5
Additionally, if a user disables location sharing on his device, that device will
cease sharing location information with Location History, even if Location History and
Location Reporting remain enabled.
6
On average, Google logs a device’s location every two minutes.
5
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can turn on another setting—“Google Location Accuracy”—that enables Google to
determine his location using more inputs than just GPS, such as Wi-Fi access points and
mobile networks. As a result, Location History can be more precise than other location-
tracking mechanisms, including cell-site location information. But whether Google
Location Accuracy is activated or not, Location History’s power should not be
exaggerated. In the end, it is only an estimate of a device’s location. So when Google
records a set of location coordinates, it includes a value (measured in meters) called a
“confidence interval,” which represents Google’s confidence in the accuracy of the
estimate. 7 Google represents that for any given location point, there is a 68% chance that
a user is somewhere within the confidence interval.
Google stores all Location History data in a repository called the “Sensorvault.”
The Sensorvault assigns each device a unique identification number and maintains all
Location History data associated with that device. Google then uses this data to build
aggregate models to assist applications like Google Maps.
In 2016, Google began receiving “geofence warrants” from law enforcement
seeking to access location information. A geofence warrant requires Google to produce
Location History data for all users who were within a geographic area (called a geofence)
during a particular time period. 8 Since 2016, geofence requests have skyrocketed in
7
For example, if the confidence interval is one hundred meters, then Google
estimates that a user is likely within a one-hundred-meter radius of the coordinates.
8
Geofence warrants seek only Location History data and no other forms of location
information, so they only affect people who had this feature enabled at the requested time
and place.
6
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number: Google claims it saw a 1,500% increase in requests from 2017 to 2018 and a
500% increase from 2018 to 2019. Concerned with the potential threat to user privacy,
Google consulted internal counsel and law enforcement agencies in 2018 and developed
its own three-step procedure for responding to geofence requests. Since then, Google has
objected to any geofence request that disregards this procedure.
Google’s procedure works as follows: At Step One, law enforcement obtains a
warrant that compels Google to disclose an anonymous list of users whose Location
History shows they were within the geofence during a specified timeframe. But Google
does not keep any lists like this on-hand. So it must first comb through its entire Location
History repository to identify users who were present in the geofence. Google then gives
law enforcement a list that includes for each user an anonymized device number, the
latitude and longitude coordinates and timestamp of each location point, a confidence
interval, and the source of the stored Location History (such as GPS or Wi-Fi). Before
disclosing this information, Google reviews the request and objects if Google deems it
overly broad.
At Step Two, law enforcement reviews the information it receives from Google. If
it determines that it needs more, then law enforcement can ask Google to produce
additional location coordinates. This time, the original geographical and temporal limits
no longer apply; for any user identified at Step One, law enforcement can request
information about his movements inside and outside the geofence over a broader period.
Yet Google generally requires law enforcement to narrow its request for this more
expansive location data to only a subset of the users pinpointed in Step One.
7
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Finally, at Step Three, law enforcement determines which individuals are relevant
to the investigation and then compels Google to provide their account-identifying
information (usually their names and email addresses). Here, too, Google typically
requires law enforcement to taper its request from the previous step, so law enforcement
can’t merely request the identity of every user identified in Step Two.
B. Facts
On May 20, 2019, someone robbed the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian,
Virginia. The suspect carried a gun and took $195,000 from the bank’s vault. He then fled
westward before police could respond.
The initial investigation into the robbery proved unfruitful. When Detective Joshua
Hylton arrived at the scene, he interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank’s security
footage. But these failed to reveal the suspect’s identity. And after chasing down two
dead-end leads, Detective Hylton seemed to be out of luck.
Yet there was one thing Detective Hylton still hadn’t tried. He saw on the security
footage that the suspect had carried a cell phone during the robbery. In the past, Detective
Hylton had sought and obtained three separate geofence warrants after consulting
prosecutors. So on June 14, 2019, he applied for and obtained a geofence warrant from the
Chesterfield County Circuit Court of Virginia.
The warrant drew a geofence with a 150-meter radius covering the bank. It then
laid out the three-step process by which law enforcement would obtain location
information from Google. At Step One, Google would provide anonymized Location
History information for all devices that appeared within the geofence from thirty minutes
8
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before to thirty minutes after the bank robbery. This information would include a
numerical identifier for each account. At Step Two, law enforcement would “attempt[] to
narrow down that list” to a smaller number of accounts and provide the narrowed list to
Google. J.A. 116. Google would then disclose anonymized location data for all those
devices from one hour before to one hour after the robbery. But unlike the Step One
information, the Step Two information would be unbounded by the geofence. Finally, at
Step Three, law enforcement would again attempt to shorten the list, and Google would
provide the username and other identity information for the requested accounts.
In response to the warrant, Google first provided 209 location data points from
nineteen accounts that appeared within the geofence during the hour-long period.
Detective Hylton then requested Step Two information from nine accounts identified at
Step One. Google responded by producing 680 data points from these accounts over the
two-hour period. Finally, Detective Hylton requested the subscriber information for three
accounts, which Google provided. One of these accounts belonged to Okello Chatrie. 9
C. Procedural History
On September 17, 2019, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia indicted
Chatrie for (1) forced accompaniment during an armed credit union robbery, in violation
of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2113(a), (d), and (e); and (2) using, carrying, or brandishing a firearm
during and in relation to a crime of violence, in violation of § 924(c)(1)(A). Chatrie was
9
According to Google’s records, Chatrie created a Google account on August 20,
2017. He later opted in to Location History from a Samsung smartphone on July 9, 2018.
9
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arraigned on October 1, 2019, and pleaded not guilty. He then moved to suppress the
evidence obtained using the geofence warrant.
On March 3, 2022, the district court denied Chatrie’s motion to suppress. Although
the court voiced concern about the threat geofence warrants pose to user privacy, it declined
to resolve whether the geofence evidence was obtained in violation of the Fourth
Amendment. Rather, the court denied the motion to suppress based on the good-faith
exception to the exclusionary rule. See United States v. Leon, 468 U.S 897 (1984).
Chatrie subsequently entered a conditional guilty plea and was sentenced to 141
months’ imprisonment and 3 years’ supervised release. This timely appeal followed.
II. Discussion
On appeal, Chatrie asks us to hold that the geofence warrant violated his Fourth
Amendment rights and that the fruits of the warrant should be suppressed. He argues that
the government conducted a Fourth Amendment search because it invaded his reasonable
expectation of privacy in his location information. He further claims that the geofence
warrant authorizing the search was invalid for lack of probable cause and particularly.
Finally, he asserts that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule does not apply to
this warrant.
The district court denied Chatrie’s motion to suppress based on the good-faith
exception. We agree that the motion should be denied, but for a different reason: Chatrie
did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours’ worth of Location History
data voluntarily exposed to Google. So the government did not conduct a search when it
obtained this information from Google. We therefore affirm the district court’s decision.
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See United States v. Smith, 395 F.3d 516, 519 (4th Cir. 2005) (holding that we may affirm
a district court “on any grounds apparent from the record”).
A. Carpenter, Beautiful Struggle, and the Third-Party Doctrine
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S.
Const. amend. IV. To trigger its protections, the government must conduct a “search” (or
“seizure”) covered by the Fourth Amendment. “For much of our history, Fourth
Amendment search doctrine was ‘tied to common-law trespass’ and focused on whether
the government ‘obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected
area.’” Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 304 (2018) (quoting United States v.
Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 405, 406 n.3 (2012)). This trespass-based approach remains alive and
well to this day. See, e.g., Jones, 565 U.S. at 405–08.
But as American society changed and technology developed, so too did the
government’s ability to intrude on sensitive areas. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 305. So the
Supreme Court birthed a new privacy-based framework in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S.
347 (1967). Under Katz, a search occurs when the government invades an individual’s
reasonable expectation of privacy. Id. at 351; id. at 360 (Harlan, J., concurring); see also
Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 740 (1979). This privacy-based approach augments the
prior trespass-based approach by providing another way to identify a Fourth Amendment
search. See Jones, 565 U.S. at 405–08; Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 304.
Though sweeping, Katz’s reasonable-expectation framework is not boundless. One
important limit on its scope is the “third-party doctrine.” The Supreme Court has long
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recognized that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he
voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith, 442 U.S. at 743–44. This is because he
“takes the risk, in revealing his affairs to another, that the information will be conveyed by
that person to the Government.” United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435, 443 (1976). And
it holds true “even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only
for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.” Id.Thus, in United States v. Miller, the Court held that the government did not conduct a
search when it obtained an individual’s bank records from his bank, since he voluntarily
exposed those records to the bank in the ordinary course of business. Id. in 443. Likewise,
in Smith v. Maryland, the Court held that the government did not conduct a search when it
used a pen register to record outgoing phone numbers dialed from a person’s telephone,
because he voluntarily conveyed those numbers to his phone company when placing calls.
442 U.S. at 742. 10
Despite its clear mandate, the third-party doctrine has proved difficult to implement
in the digital age. After all, “people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to
third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.” Jones, 565 U.S. at 417(Sotomayor, J., concurring). If they lack Fourth Amendment protections for any
10
Of course, Miller and Smith were not the only cases to invoke this principle. The
Court has applied the third-party doctrine to other kinds of information, too, including
incriminating conversations with undercover agents, United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745,
749–52 (1971), and tax documents given to an accountant, Couch v. United States, 409
U.S. 322, 335 (1973).
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electronically shared data, then the government could access whole swaths of private
information free from constitutional scrutiny.
The Court addressed this tension in a series of cases involving the government’s use
of location-tracking technology. First, in United States v. Knotts, the Court held that the
government did not conduct a search when it placed a tracking device in a container
purchased by one of Knotts’s co-conspirators and used it to monitor his short trip to Knott’s
cabin. 460 U.S. 276, 278–80 (1983). The Court explained that “[a] person traveling in an
automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his
movements from one place to another,” since he “voluntarily convey[s] [them] to anyone
who want[s] to look.” Id. at 281. The use of the tracker merely “augment[ed]” existing
police capabilities and “amounted principally to the following of an automobile on public
streets and highways.” Id. at 281–82. Yet the Court reserved whether it would treat long-
term surveillance differently. Id. at 283–84. 11
11
Separately, the Court held that police did not conduct a search when they observed
the beeper on the premises of Knotts’s cabin. Knotts, 460 U.S. at 284–85. “[T]here is no
indication,” the Court explained, “that the beeper was used in any way to reveal
information as to the movement of the drum within the cabin, or in any way that would not
have been visible to the naked eye from outside the cabin.” Id. at 285. So the government
did not invade Knott’s reasonable expectation of privacy in his home when it observed the
beeper on his property.
Yet the Court reached the opposite result one year later in United States v. Karo,
468 U.S. 705 (1984). Karo, like Knotts, involved police use of a beeper to monitor the
movement of a container; only this time, officers used it to determine whether the container
remained inside a home rented by several of the defendants. Id. at 709–10. The Court held
that this use of the beeper “violate[d] the Fourth Amendment rights of those who ha[d] a
justifiable interest in the privacy of the residence.” Id. at 714. The beeper allowed the
government to obtain information that it otherwise could not have obtained—that the item
was still inside the house—without entering the home itself, which would have required a
(Continued)
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This issue later resurfaced in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400. There, the
government attached a GPS device to Jones’s automobile and used it to track his
movements for twenty-eight days. Id. at 402–04. Applying the original property-based
approach, the Court decided that the government’s physical trespass on Jones’s vehicle
amounted to a search. Id. at 404–05. But in separate opinions, five Justices would have
held that “longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on
expectations of privacy”—even though a person’s movements are seemingly shared with
third parties. Id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment); id. at 415 (opinion of
Sotomayor, J.). Such long-term monitoring violates reasonable expectations of privacy
because “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would
not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every
single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id. at 430 (opinion of Alito,
J.).
After Jones, it was unclear how the Court would decide a case involving long-term
monitoring without a physical trespass. The Court eventually considered this issue in
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296. Carpenter involved government access to
warrant. Id. at 715. It therefore intruded on the reasonable expectation of privacy of all
who had a Fourth Amendment interest in that home. Id. at 719 (ruling that the evidence
was inadmissible against “those with privacy interests in the house”); see also Kyllo v.
United States, 533 U.S. 27, 40 (2001) (“Where, as here, the Government uses a device that
is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been
unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a ‘search’ and is presumptively
unreasonable without a warrant.”); but see Karo, 468 U.S. at 716 n.4 (distinguishing
Rawlings v. Kentucky, 448 U.S. 98 (1980), since the defendant in that case did not have a
reasonable expectation of privacy in the place searched).
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historical cell-site location information (“CSLI”)—a time-stamped record that is
automatically generated every time any cell phone connects to a cell site. Id. at 300–01.
The government requested—without a warrant—7 days’ worth of Carpenter’s historical
CSLI from one wireless carrier and 152 days’ worth from another. Id. at 302. 12 It then
used this information to tie him to the scene of several robberies. Id. Carpenter moved to
suppress the evidence, arguing that the government had conducted a search without a
warrant. Id.
The Court began by noting that government access to CSLI “does not fit neatly
under existing precedents” but “lie[s] at the intersection of two lines of cases, both of which
inform our understanding of the privacy interests at stake.” Id. at 306. Starting with the
location-tracking cases, the Court found that CSLI “partakes of many of the qualities”—
and in some ways, exceeds them—“of the GPS monitoring we considered in Jones.” Id.
at 309–13. The unprecedented surveillance capabilities afforded by CSLI, retrospective
over days, reveal—directly and by deduction—a broad array of private information. Id. at
310–12. The Court thus explained that CSLI provides law enforcement “an all-
encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts” over that period, id. at 311, allowing it
to peer into a person’s “privacies of life,” including “familial, political, professional,
religious, and sexual associations.” Id. (first quoting Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 403
(2014); and then quoting Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (opinion of Sotomayor, J.)). Such access—
12
Although the government requested 7 days’ worth of CSLI from one wireless
carrier and 152 days’ worth from the other, it received only 2 days’ worth from the former
and 127 days’ worth from the latter. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 302.
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at least, to 7 days’ worth of CSLI—invades the reasonable expectation of privacy
individuals have “in the whole of their physical movements.” Id. at 310 & n.3.
That Carpenter “shared” his CSLI with his wireless carriers didn’t change the
Court’s conclusion. Id. at 314. Rejecting the government’s invocation of the third-party
doctrine, the Court found that the rationales that historically supported the doctrine did not
apply to CSLI. Id. It first considered “‘the nature of the particular documents sought’ to
determine whether ‘there is a legitimate “expectation of privacy” concerning their
contents.’” Id. (quoting Miller, 425 U.S. at 442). And it found that, unlike the bank records
in Miller or the pen register in Smith, CSLI is extremely revealing of a person’s private
life. Id. at 314–15 (noting that CSLI is a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence
compiled every day, every moment, over several years”). The government’s access of this
information therefore “implicates privacy concerns far beyond those considered in Smith
and Miller.” Id. at 315.
The Court then found that Carpenter did not voluntarily expose this “comprehensive
dossier of his physical movements” to his wireless carriers. Id. Rather, “a cell phone logs
a cell-site record by dint of its operation, without any affirmative act on the part of the user
beyond powering up.” Id. Put differently, having and operating a cell phone automatically
and necessarily requires the transmission of one’s CSLI to the wireless carrier. And cell
phones “are ‘such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life,’” the Court explained, “that
carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society.” Id. (quoting Riley, 573
U.S. at 385). So “in no meaningful sense does the user voluntarily ‘assume[] the risk’ of
turning over” this information. Id. (second alteration in original) (quoting Smith, 442 U.S.
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at 745). The Court thus declined to extend the third-party doctrine to overcome Carpenter’s
Fourth Amendment protection. Id.The Court emphasized that its holding was “a narrow one.” Id. at 316. It did not
decide how the Fourth Amendment applies to other forms of data collection, like real-time
(as opposed to historical) CSLI or “tower dumps” (i.e., records of phones connected to a
particular cell tower over a given period). Id. Nor did it jettison the third-party doctrine’s
application in other contexts. Id. All it held was that the government’s acquisition of at
least 7 days’ worth of historical CSLI is a search within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment. Id. at 316, 310 n.3. 13
Three years later, we clarified the scope of Carpenter’s holding in Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle v. Balt. Police Dep’t, 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc). Beautiful
Struggle involved a Fourth Amendment challenge to the City of Baltimore’s aerial-
surveillance program. Id. at 333. The program captured aerial photos of thirty-two square
city miles every second for “at least 40 hours a week, obtaining an estimated twelve hours
of coverage of around 90% of the city each day.” Id. at 334. We interpreted Carpenter to
“solidif[y] the line between short-term tracking of public movements—akin to what law
enforcement could do ‘[p]rior to the digital age’—and prolonged tracking that can reveal
intimate details through habits and patterns.” Id. at 341 (second alteration in original)
13
The dissent reads Carpenter to hold that access to just 2 days’ worth of CSLI is a
search. Diss. Op. at 65. But even though one of the wireless carriers produced only 2 days’
worth of CSLI in response to the government’s request for 7 days’ worth, Carpenter only
held that “accessing seven days of CSLI constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.”
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 310 n.3 (emphasis added).
17
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(quoting Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 310). And we held that Baltimore’s program crossed that
line because it afforded the government retroactive access to a “detailed, encyclopedic”
record of every person’s movement in the city across days and weeks. Id. (quoting
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 309). The sheer breadth of this information “enable[d] deductions
about ‘what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,’
which ‘reveal[s] more about a person than does any individual trip viewed in isolation.’”
Id. at 342 (second alteration in original) (quoting United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544,
562–63 (D.C. Cir. 2010)). So we held that, when it accessed this information, the
government intruded on reasonable expectations of privacy and thereby conducted a
search. Id. at 346. 14
B. Application
Relying on Carpenter, Chatrie argues that the government conducted a search when
it obtained his Location History data from Google. 15 We disagree. Carpenter identified
two rationales that justify applying the third-party doctrine: the limited degree to which
the information sought implicates privacy concerns and the voluntary exposure of that
information to third parties. Both rationales apply here. Accordingly, we find that Chatrie
14
The government did not invoke the third-party doctrine in Beautiful Struggle.
15
Chatrie does not argue that the government conducted a search when it obtained
his subscriber information from Google at Step Three of the geofence warrant process.
This is probably because we have already held that individuals do not have a reasonable
expectation of privacy in subscriber information they provide to an internet provider. See
United States v. Bynum, 604 F.3d 161, 164 (4th Cir. 2010). Chatrie does not ask us to
revisit this holding in light of Carpenter, so here we consider only whether the
government’s access of his Location History data was a search.
18
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did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the two hours’ worth of Location
History data that law enforcement obtained from Google. So the government did not
conduct a search by obtaining it.
Start with the nature of the information sought. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 314. The
government requested and obtained only two hours’ worth of Chatrie’s Location History
data. 16 By no means was this an “all-encompassing record of [Chatrie’s] whereabouts . . .
provid[ing] an intimate window into [his] person[al] life.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311. All
the government had was an “individual trip viewed in isolation,” which, standing alone,
was not enough to “enable[] deductions about ‘what [Chatrie] does repeatedly, what he
does not do, and what he does ensemble.’” 17 Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 342 (quoting
Maynard, 615 F.3d at 562–63). The information obtained was therefore far less revealing
16
At argument, Chatrie suggested that the search occurred when Google looked
through its entire Location History database at the government’s behest. But Carpenter
and Beautiful Struggle both held that a search only occurs once the government accesses
the requested information. See Beautiful Struggle, 4 F.4th at 344 (“Carpenter was clear on
that issue: a search took place ‘when the Government accessed CSLI from the wireless
carriers.’” (quoting Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 313)). So the proper focus of our inquiry is
whether the government’s access to two hours’ worth of Chatrie’s Location History data
was a search.
17
Chatrie raises the possibility that a geofence warrant could reveal a person’s
movements within a constitutionally protected space, like his home. See Karo, 468 U.S.
at 716–17; Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 40. The district court expressed similar concerns and noted
that the instant geofence warrant included potentially sensitive locations within its radius.
But this is an issue for future cases, not the one before us. Chatrie does not contend that
the warrant revealed his own movements within his own constitutionally protected space.
And to the extent that it might have captured his or others’ movements in another person’s
protected space, Chatrie lacks standing to assert their potential Fourth Amendment claims.
See Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 133–34 (1978); Brown v. United States, 411 U.S. 223,
230 (1973).
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than that obtained in Jones, Carpenter, or Beautiful Struggle and more like the short-term
public movements in Knotts, which the Court found were “voluntarily conveyed to anyone
who wanted to look.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 314 (quoting Knotts, 460 U.S. at 281). 18 A
record of a person’s single, brief trip is no more revealing than his bank records or
telephone call logs. See Miller, 425 U.S. at 442; Smith, 442 U.S. at 742. Chatrie thus did
not have a “legitimate ‘expectation of privacy,’” in the information obtained by the
government, so the first rationale for the third-party doctrine applies here. Carpenter, 585
U.S. at 314 (quoting Miller, 425 U.S. at 442).
Furthermore, Chatrie voluntarily exposed his location information to Google by
opting in to Location History. Id. at 315. Consider again how Location History works.
Location History is an optional setting that adds extra features, like traffic updates and
targeted advertisements, to a user’s experience. But it is “off by default” and must be
affirmatively activated by a user before Google begins tracking and storing his location
data. J.A. 1333–34. Of course, once Google secures this consent, it monitors his location
at all times and across all devices. Yet even then, Google still affords the user ultimate
control over how his data is used: If he changes his mind, he can review, edit, or delete the
collected information and stop Google from collecting more. Whether Google tracks a
18
Chatrie argues that the amount of information obtained shouldn’t matter, given
the accuracy with which Location History can estimate a user’s location. Yet the question
is not whether the government knew with exact precision what Chatrie did on an
“individual trip viewed in isolation,” Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 342 (quoting Maynard,
615 F.3d at 562), but whether it gathered enough information from many trips to “reveal
intimate details through habits and patterns,” id. at 341. That was not the case here.
20
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user’s location, therefore, is entirely up to the user himself. If Google compiles a record
of his whereabouts, it is only because he has authorized Google to do so.
Nor is a user’s consent secured in ignorance, either. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 314
(explaining that the third-party doctrine applies to information “knowingly shared with
another”). To the contrary, the record shows that Google provides users with ample notice
about the nature of this setting. Before Google allows a user to enable Location History, it
first displays text that explains the basics of the service. The text states that enabling
Location History “[s]aves where you go with your devices,” meaning “[t]his data may be
saved and used in any Google service where you were signed in to give you more
personalized experiences.” It also informs a user about his ability to view, delete, or change
his location data. 19 A user cannot opt in to Location History without seeing this text.
So unlike with CSLI, a user knowingly and voluntarily exposes his Location History
data to Google. First, Location History is not “‘such a pervasive and insistent part of daily
life’ that [activating it] is indispensable to participation in modern society.” Carpenter,
585 U.S. at 315 (quoting Riley, 573 U.S. at 385). Carpenter found that it is impossible to
participate in modern life without a cell phone. Id. But the same cannot be said of Location
History. While Location History offers a few useful features to a user’s experience, its
activation is unnecessary to use a phone or even to use apps like Google Maps. Chatrie
gives us no reason to think that these added features are somehow indispensable to
participation in modern society and that his decision to opt in was therefore involuntary.
19
Google provides additional notice of this setting in its Privacy Policy.
21
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That two-thirds of active Google users have not enabled Location History is strong
evidence to the contrary. Cf. Riley, 573 U.S. at 385 (noting that, as of 2014, “a significant
majority of American adults” owned smartphones). Thus, a user can decline to use
Location History and still participate meaningfully in modern society.
Second, unlike CSLI, Location History data is obtained by a user’s affirmative act.
Carpenter noted that “a cell phone logs a cell-site record by dint of its operation, without
any affirmative act on the part of the user beyond powering up.” 585 U.S. at 315. But
Location History is off by default and can be enabled only by a user’s affirmative act. A
person need not go off the grid by “disconnecting [his] phone from the network . . . to
avoid” generating Location History data; instead, he can simply decline to opt in and
continue using his phone as before. See id. Thus, “in [every] meaningful sense,” a user
who enables Location History “voluntarily ‘assume[s] the risk’” of turning over his
location information. Id. (quoting Smith, 442 U.S. at 745). So the second rationale for the
third-party doctrine applies here, too.
The third-party doctrine therefore squarely governs this case. The government
obtained only two hours’ worth of Chatrie’s location information, which could not reveal
the privacies of his life. And Chatrie opted in to Location History on July 9, 2018. This
means that he knowingly and voluntarily chose to allow Google to collect and store his
location information. In so doing, he “t[ook] the risk, in revealing his affairs to [Google],
that the information [would] be conveyed by [Google] to the Government.” Miller, 425
U.S. at 443. He cannot now claim to have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in this
22
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information. See Smith, 442 U.S. at 743–44. The government therefore did not conduct a
search when it obtained the data. 20
C. Responding to the Dissent
In our view, this case involves a straightforward application of the third-party
doctrine. But the dissent disagrees. Unlike us, the dissent reads Carpenter to have
abandoned both strands of doctrine that preceded it, at least when the government uses new
technology to monitor a person’s movements. In their place, the dissent explains, the Court
20
At argument, Chatrie’s counsel argued that this was a search because Chatrie has
a property interest in his Location History data. Oral Arg. at 0:30–0:45. But Chatrie
forfeited his right to raise this issue on appeal. “It is a well settled rule that contentions not
raised in the argument section of the opening brief are abandoned.” United States v. Boyd,
55 F.4th 272, 279 (4th Cir. 2022) (quoting United States v. Al-Hamdi, 356 F.3d 564, 571
n.8 (4th Cir. 2004) (emphasis added)); see also Fed. R. App. P. 28(a)(8). Chatrie did not
advance this claim in the argument section of his opening brief. Instead, he merely alluded
to it in a two-sentence footnote that appeared in the facts section. See Opening Br. at 14–
15 n.3. Not until his reply brief did Chatrie raise this issue. So Chatrie has forfeited it on
appeal.
Even if we found that Chatrie did not forfeit this issue, we would still reject it on
the merits. Chatrie does not cite any positive law (state or federal) that gives him an
ownership interest in his Location History data. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 331 (Kennedy,
J., dissenting); id. at 353–54 (Thomas, J., dissenting); id. at 402 (Gorsuch, J., dissenting).
Nor does he claim that he could bring a tort suit if this information were stolen. See id. at
353 (Thomas, J., dissenting). Instead, he relies largely on the fact that Google describes
Location History as “your information,” J.A. 39 (emphasis added), and as a user’s “virtual
journal,” J.A. 128. But this is an incredibly thin reed on which to hang such a bold
pronouncement. Though we issue no opinion on whether Google can create a property
interest merely by saying one exists, Google at least knows how to recognize preexisting
property rights when it wants to. At the time Chatrie opted in to Location History, Google
explicitly labelled digital cloud content as user property. See J.A. 2083 (“You retain
ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what
belongs to you stays yours.”). But Google used no such language to describe its location
services. See J.A. 2051 (describing location information as content Google “collect[s]”
and omitting mention of property rights); J.A. 1339–40 (omitting mention of property
rights at the initial opt-in). We therefore cannot hold, based on the record before us, that
Chatrie had a property interest in his Location History data.
23
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concocted anew a four (or five?) factor balancing test that considers whether police
obtained information that was comprehensive, retrospective, intimate, easy to access, and
(perhaps?) voluntarily exposed. Diss. Op. at 49–51. The dissent then puts a pot on the
fire, combines these ingredients, and voila!—finds that the police conducted a search here.
For all its bold pronouncements, the dissent’s novel framework only works if you
interpret Carpenter to have jettisoned both lines of cases that preceded it and created a new
inquiry from scratch. Indeed, this thesis seems to undergird the dissent’s entire argument,
as it repeats it over and over. 21 Contrary to the dissent’s claims, however, Carpenter did
not cast away the decisions that preceded it. Rather, the Court explicitly stated that both
the Knotts-Jones and the Smith-Miller lines of cases “inform our understanding of the
privacy interests at stake.” 585 U.S. at 306. It then went on to apply the principles
announced in the location-tracking cases, id. at 310, and to distinguish—based on the
unique features of CSLI—the third-party cases, id. at 313–16.
21
See, e.g., Diss. Op. at 47 (“Both lines of cases would seemingly ‘inform our
understanding of the privacy interests at stake,’ . . . but neither squarely applies because
this kind of data constitutes a ‘qualitatively different category’ of information . . . .” (first
quoting Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306; then quoting id. at 309)); id. at 48 (“After concluding
that no existing Fourth Amendment doctrine applied neatly to such a digital innovation,
the Carpenter Court applied a new framework based on the historical understandings of
privacy protections that it had described and concluded that the CSLI obtained ‘was the
product of a search’ that required a warrant.” (quoting Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 310)); id. at
51 (“Put simply, the Court declined to extend existing doctrines to exempt CSLI from
Fourth Amendment protections based on the principle that it first recognized decades
earlier: previously unimaginable technology that reveals unprecedented amounts of
personal information requires new rules.”); id. at 52 (“To sum up, the Court concluded that
‘personal location information maintained by a third party’ lies at the intersection of the
public-surveillance and third-party cases, but that neither theory ‘neatly’ applies.” (quoting
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306)).
24
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Start with Carpenter’s treatment of Jones. Carpenter explained that CLSI “partakes
of many of the same qualities of the GPS monitoring that we considered in Jones,” since it
is “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled.” Id. at 309. Therefore, the Court
held that, as in Jones, the government’s access to large quantities of this information
implicates the reasonable expectation of privacy individuals have in the “whole of their
physical movements.” Id. at 310.
Seen in this light, the “factors” identified by the dissent here were not factors at all.
They were instead attributes of the large quantity of CSLI obtained by the government that
implicated the privacy interest recognized by the concurring Justices in Jones. The Court
found that access to at least 7 days’ worth of Carpenter’s CSLI provided a “comprehensive
record” of his movements, which revealed intimate details of his life that would not have
been knowable if the government only pursued him for a “brief stretch.” Carpenter, 585
U.S. at 310–11. And the retrospective nature of CSLI and the ease by which it could be
accessed only augmented these privacy concerns, for no comparable record of a person’s
movements was available to law enforcement in a pre-digital age. Id. at 311–12. In sum,
the quantity of CSLI obtained by the government, combined with its immense capabilities,
made it akin to the long-term GPS information obtained in Jones. So the Court applied
established principles and found that Carpenter’s CSLI warranted Fourth Amendment
protection.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. Rather look to our en banc opinion in
Beautiful Struggle. 2 F.4th 330. Beautiful Struggle was our first application of Carpenter
to novel location-tracking technology. Yet nowhere in that opinion did we suggest that
25
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Carpenter departed from cases like Knotts and Jones and created a new, factor-based
inquiry. On the contrary, we recognized that “[t]he touchstone in Carpenter was the line
of cases addressing ‘a person’s expectation of privacy in [their] physical location and
movements,’” i.e., Knotts and Jones. 2 F.4th at 340 (alteration in original) (quoting
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306–07)). We then explained that
Carpenter solidified the line between short-term tracking of public
movements—akin to what law enforcement could do ‘[p]rior to the digital
age’—and prolonged tracking that can reveal intimate details through habits
and patterns. . . . The latter form of surveillance invades the reasonable
expectation of privacy that individuals have in the whole of their movements
and therefore requires a warrant.
Id. at 341 (alteration in original). Far from recognizing any sort of factor-based inquiry,
therefore, Beautiful Struggle announced the exact line we draw here—that police invade
an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements
when they use technology to monitor his long-term movements, but not when they glimpse
only his short-term movements. See also id. at 345 (“People understand that they may be
filmed by security cameras on city streets, or a police officer could stake out their house
and tail them for a time. . . . But capturing everyone’s movements outside during the
daytime for 45 days goes beyond that ordinary capacity.”).
Although not couched under this label, Beautiful Struggle articulated a version of
what one scholar calls the “Mosaic Theory” of the Fourth Amendment. See Orin S. Kerr,
The Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment, 111 Mich. L. Rev. 311 (2012). The Mosaic
Theory asks whether the government has observed enough of a person’s physical
movements to deduce intimate details about his private life that could not be learned from
26
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simply observing his isolated trips or activities. Under this theory, access to a person’s
short-term movements does not invade his reasonable expectation of privacy. Such
information reveals only the locations he visits and nothing more, which is something that
law enforcement could learn from traditional means of surveillance anyway. Beautiful
Struggle, 2 F.4th at 341; Jones, 565 U.S. at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). But much more is
revealed when the government accesses a larger swath of a person’s movements, as this
“enables deductions about ‘what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what
he does ensemble,’ which ‘reveal[s] more about a person than does any individual trip
viewed in isolation.’” Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 342 (alteration in original) (quoting
Maynard, 615 F.3d at 562–63)). In other words, it exposes “not only his particular
movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual
associations.’” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311 (quoting Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (opinion of
Sotomayor, J.)). Society does not expect that law enforcement would or could gather such
a wealth of intimate details about an individual’s personal life from his physical
movements. Jones, 565 U.S. at 430 (opinion of Alito, J.). So when the government crosses
that line, it invades a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy and conducts a search. 22
22
The classic explanation of the Mosaic Theory comes from the D.C. Circuit’s
decision in United States v. Maynard, which we quoted extensively when explaining this
idea in Beautiful Struggle:
The difference is not one of degree but of kind, for no single journey reveals
the habits and patterns that mark the distinction between a day in the life and
a way of life, nor the departure from a routine that, like the dog that did not
bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, may reveal even more. . . . Repeated visits
to a church, a gym, a bar, or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit,
(Continued)
27
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The dissent misses Beautiful Struggle’s distinction when it catalogues the kind of
private details that could be learned from two hours’ worth of Location History. According
to the dissent, a two-hour snippet of Location History could reveal a wealth of otherwise
unknowable and intimate information, like a person’s “romantic rendezvous,” “medical
appointments,” or “afternoon and early-evening routines.” Diss. Op. at 63. But the theory
adopted in Beautiful Struggle rejects this exact proposition. To be sure, a two-hour snippet
might show that someone visited an apartment, swung by a doctor’s office, and then
popped into a gym. Yet glimpsing this single trip in isolation could not itself enable sound
deductions about that person’s habits, routines, and associations. For example, he may
have visited the apartment because he is having an affair, but he equally could have been
seeing a friend for coffee, touring a housing upgrade, or buying a couch off of Facebook
marketplace. Similarly, he might have visited the doctor’s office for his appointment, yet
he also could have been dropping off his spouse or collecting information about the
doctor’s services or needs. And observing someone enter a gym once certainly cannot
confirm whether he is a gym rat or simply riding a New Years high. Only by observing
as does one’s not visiting any of these places over the course of a month. The
sequence of a person’s movements can reveal still more; a single trip to a
gynecologist’s office tells little about a woman, but that trip followed a few
weeks later by a visit to a baby supply store tells a different story. A person
who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church
goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an
outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals
or political groups—and not just one such fact about a person, but all such
facts.
Maynard, 615 F.3d at 562; see Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 342 n.8.
28
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that person’s movements over a longer period could the police reliably deduce his habits,
routines, and associations. No such deductions could accurately be made from a mere two-
hour glimpse. 23
Applying this theory here leads to a straightforward conclusion. As the dissent
correctly observes, Location History has capabilities much like GPS data and CSLI. But
unlike in Carpenter or Jones, the government in this case obtained only two hours’ worth
of Chatrie’s Location History data. Although this brief glimpse into his whereabouts may
have revealed the locations he visited, it was plainly insufficient to offer insight into his
habits, routines, and associations. So the government did not invade his “legitimate
‘expectation of privacy’” by obtaining it. 24 Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 314 (quoting Miller,
425 U.S. at 442).
23
The dissent also stresses that law enforcement could deduce the identity of
individuals caught within the geofence. Diss. Op. at 63–64. But we fail to see how this is
relevant. If law enforcement only observed the short-term movements of everyone caught
within the geofence, then it does not matter whether it learned the identity of those people
or not—it still did not invade anyone’s privacy interest in the whole of their physical
movements.
24
We recognize that the theory we apply could lead to hard line-drawing problems
in other cases. Some scholars have criticized the Mosaic Theory on precisely these
grounds. See, e.g., Kerr, The Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment, at 343–53. Indeed,
both members of today’s majority disagreed with the application of this theory in Beautiful
Struggle itself. See 2 F.4th at 359–62 (Wilkinson, J., dissenting). But regardless of any
flaws inherent in this approach, it is the established doctrine of our Circuit. We must apply
it as faithfully as we can. And if this theory is to have any meaning, then at the very least
it must entail that police observation of a person’s two-hour public foray cannot be a search
under the Fourth Amendment. Any other result would render the principle announced in
Beautiful Struggle meaningless.
29
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Unable to refute this point, the dissent tries a different tack. The dissent argues that
Beautiful Struggle and Knotts are distinguishable because they involved observation of
“strictly . . . public movements.” Diss. Op. at 94. According to the dissent, the duration
of the government surveillance is only relevant in cases involving a person’s public
movements. But this case, unlike Beautiful Struggle and Knotts, involves technology with
the capacity to surveil a person’s private movements, too. So the dissent would apply a
different set of principles here and treat the duration of the intrusion as basically irrelevant.
The dissent is correct that the government conducts a search when it uses sense-
enhancing technology to learn information from inside a private space that it could not
have learned without physically intruding on that space. See Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 34; Karo,
468 U.S. at 713–18. But the dissent fails to mention that those cases involved challenges
brought by people who had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the place searched.
Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 29–31; Karo, 468 U.S. at 714 (“This case thus presents the question
whether the monitoring of a beeper in a private residence, a location not open to visual
surveillance, violates the Fourth Amendment rights of those who have a justifiable interest
in the privacy of the residence. . . . [W]e think that it does.” (emphasis added)). By
contrast, the Supreme Court has long held that someone who does not have a Fourth
Amendment interest in the place or thing searched lacks standing to challenge that search.
Rawlings, 448 U.S. at 104–06; see Karo, 468 U.S. at 716 n.4, 719 (distinguishing Rawlings
because several defendants had a privacy interest in the place searched, unlike in
Rawlings). So to challenge the government’s use of technology to invade a protected
space, a defendant must prove that the government violated his reasonable expectation of
30
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privacy in that space. The mere fact that the government observed him behind closed doors
is insufficient to confer Fourth Amendment standing.
Chatrie does not allege that the Location History data obtained by the government
invaded his constitutionally protected space, like his home. 25 And to the extent that it may
have showed him or others in someone else’s protected space, Chatrie lacks standing to
assert that person’s potential Fourth Amendment rights. The dissent may be willing
looking past these basic Fourth Amendment standing principles, but we are not. 26
Now to the dissent’s treatment of the third-party doctrine. The dissent thinks that
the Supreme Court abandoned Smith and Miller, just like it abandoned Knotts and Jones.
After Carpenter, on the dissent’s view, voluntary exposure either doesn’t matter or, if it
does, is just another factor in the overall balancing inquiry.
25
Again, we take no position on whether this would be a search, since this issue is
not properly presented here. But we do note that the answer isn’t as obvious as the dissent
represents that it would be. Compare Karo, 486 U.S. at 713–18, with California v. Ciraolo,
476 U.S. 207, 213 (1986) (holding that no search occurs when officers use technology to
peer into a person’s curtilage if the person knowingly exposes his curtilage’s contents to
others), and Lewis v. United States, 385 U.S. 206, 211 (1966) (holding that no search occurs
when a person invites someone into his home who turns out to be a law enforcement
informant).
26
Adopting the dissent’s sweeping approach would create a bizarre incongruity with
other areas of Fourth Amendment doctrine. Under traditional Fourth Amendment
principles, if the police physically entered Journey Christian Church without a warrant in
search of Chatrie, he would not have standing to challenge that search (assuming he had
no privacy interest in the church). But under the dissent’s view, if police digitally “entered”
that same church via Location History, Chatrie could challenge this as an invasion of his
rights. For a view that claims to champion “historical understandings” of the Fourth
Amendment, Diss. Op. at 46 (quoting Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 305), the dissent’s approach
actually eviscerates basic and longstanding Fourth Amendment principles.
31
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But Carpenter did no such thing. As we have already explained, Carpenter did not
cast aside everything that came before it and create a new framework for assessing Fourth
Amendment violations. Rather, the Court concluded that access to at least 7 days’ worth
of CSLI invaded Carpenter’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical
movements. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 310–13. It then considered whether the third-party
doctrine applied to CSLI and ultimately “decline[d] to extend” it, given the sensitive nature
of that information and the fact that it is not voluntarily exposed to wireless carriers. Id. at
313–16. Yet Court did not overturn the third-party doctrine, nor did it rule out the
possibility of it applying to other types of information or technology that fit more
comfortably within its domain. Id. at 316. And it certainly did not reduce the doctrine to
one factor in a totality-of-the-circumstances balancing inquiry. 27
Here, we find that Chatrie—unlike Carpenter—did voluntarily expose his Location
History to Google. So we conclude that the third-party doctrine applies to this case. But
the dissent disagrees and identifies three facts that supposedly make Chatrie’s disclosure
of his Location History information not “meaningfully voluntary.” Diss. Op. at 69. First,
Location History, once enabled, always generates and collects information, so its collection
27
The dissent’s reading is only plausible because it creatively rearranges Carpenter
to say something it never did. According to the dissent, Carpenter first “declin[ed] to
extend the third-party doctrine,” Diss. Op. at 48, then applied its “new framework” to
recognize Carpenter’s privacy interest, id. at 48–49, and finally considered voluntariness
as a sort of independent factor, id. at 49. But this is not at all how the Court proceeded.
Rather, it first recognized that access to 7 days’ worth of CSLI invaded Carpenter’s
reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements, 585 U.S. at
310–13, and then declined to extend the third party doctrine, partly because Carpenter’s
conveyance of CSLI was not meaningfully voluntary, id. at 313–16.
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is even more automatic and less voluntary than the CSLI collected in Carpenter. Second,
many individuals generate Location History data, so they must do so involuntarily. Third,
Google does not “meaningfully inform” users of how it collects data or how much data it
collects at the opt-in stage. Id. at 74. We address each argument in turn, finding none
convincing.
First, the dissent confuses the extent to which technology conveys information with
whether such conveyance is done voluntarily. Carpenter found that CSLI is conveyed
“without any affirmative act on the part of the user beyond powering up” his cell phone.
585 U.S. at 315. Thus, a cell phone conveys such information “automatically” without
action on the user’s part beyond activating his phone. Id. By contrast, a user who merely
activates and uses his cell phone will not generate Location History data. He only does so
once he takes the affirmative step of opting in to the program and consenting to the
collection of such data. So even though Location History, once enabled, is constantly
collected, it is only constantly collected because it has first been enabled. 28
Second, the fact that a large number of active Google users have enabled Location
History does not prove that they use this service involuntarily. We agree with the dissent
that “the use of technology is not per se voluntary just because the adoption of that
technology is not as ubiquitous as the cell phone.” Diss. Op. at 72. But the flip-side is also
28
Nor is the absence of a “physical conveyance,” like those in Smith and Miller, a
meaningful distinction. Diss. Op. at 71. Someone who invites another to follow him
around and record his movements has conveyed his location information just as voluntarily
as someone who records every movement himself and gives the record to another.
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true: The ubiquitous use of a particular technology does not necessarily mean that it is
used involuntarily. And absent some explanation for why Location History is “‘such a
pervasive and insistent part of daily life’ that [activating it] is indispensable to participation
in modern society,” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 315 (quoting Riley, 573 U.S., at 385), we see
no reason to treat it as such. 29
Finally, Google provides adequate information at the opt-in stage to enable a user
to knowingly consent to the collection of his data. Before a user can activate Location
History, Google explains that “Location History saves where you go with your devices,”
that “Google regularly obtains location data from your devices,” and that “[t]his data is
saved even when you aren’t using a specific Google service, like Google Maps or Google
search.” J.A. 1565. By choosing to opt in, then, a reasonable user would understand that
he gave Google broad authorization to track and save Location History data whenever he
goes anywhere with his device, even while he is not using it. A user who accepts those
terms cannot later claim he did not knowingly expose his information simply because
Google didn’t explain exactly how accurately it would save where he went or exactly how
regularly it would obtain location data. Cf. Smith, 442 U.S. at 745 (“The fortuity of whether
or not the phone company in fact elects to make a quasi-permanent record of a particular
number dialed does not[,] in our view, make any constitutional difference.”); Florida v.
29
The dissent misunderstands why we emphasize that two-third of active Google
users have not enabled Location History. We do not invoke this number because we think
there is some numeric threshold of users that a service must surpass to become involuntary.
Rather, we only think it shows that if Location History were really essential to participation
in modern society, it would be odd that most Google users have not activated this service.
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Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248, 251 (1991) (holding that officers didn’t exceed the scope of consent
when suspect told them they could search the entire car and they searched containers within
the car). 30
The dissent warns that courts must exercise “humility” when adapting the Fourth
Amendment to modern innovations. Diss. Op. at 103. But it is the dissent that fails to heed
its own warning. Instead of faithfully apply established principles to the case before us,
the dissent would have us depart from binding case law and apply a novel, unwieldy
multifactor balancing test to reach the dissent’s preferred policy outcome. We decline the
invitation. Our Fourth Amendment doctrine compels a clear result here. If one thinks that
this result is undesirable on policy grounds, those concerns should be taken to Congress.
* * *
The Fourth Amendment is an important safeguard to individual liberty. But its
protections are not endless. To transgress its command, the government must first conduct
a search. We hold that the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when
it accessed two hours’ worth of Chatrie’s location information that he voluntarily exposed
to Google. Thus, the district court’s decision must be
AFFIRMED.
30
The dissent also laments that pausing and deleting Location History is “easier said
than done,” Diss. Op. at 76, but its evidence for this proposition is basically nonexistent.
Other than alluding to generalized grievances about Location History by members of
Congress, the media, and Norway’s Consumer Protection Committee, the dissent relies on
a single email from a Google employee, who suggested that deleting Location History data
might be difficult. But the district court made no finding about “[w]hether the substance
of this remark is true or not,” J.A. 1342, and, absent any further evidence, there is no way
to know whether this remark accurately reflects the difficulty of deleting Location History
data.
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WYNN, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
This appeal presents this Court’s latest opportunity to consider how the Fourth
Amendment applies to police use of new surveillance technologies, particularly in light of
the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States.
The analysis that follows (1) addresses how the Court’s understanding of privacy
protections evolved alongside technological developments and how Carpenter marked the
culmination of that evolution; (2) provides a detailed overview of Carpenter to explain the
new multifactor test it set forward; (3) applies that test to the Location History intrusion at
bar; and (4) concludes that the intrusion was a search that triggered the Fourth
Amendment’s protections.
Finally, in an attempt to address this dissent, the majority provides a lengthy
separate part to its opinion, relying on unsupported policy premises to support extrajudicial
conclusions rather than addressing the serious substantive issues presented by this appeal.
To redirect our focus to the merits of this matter, I have added a final section to this
dissenting opinion.
I.
At the heart of this appeal, the majority opinion concludes that the government has
a virtually unrestricted right to obtain the Location Data History of every citizen. But I
believe the government needs a warrant to obtain such Location History data. And that’s
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something the government itself apparently believed at the time it conducted the respective
intrusion, since it sought and obtained a warrant in this matter. 1
A.
Ratified in 1791, the Fourth Amendment safeguards the “right of the people to be
secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures,” by generally requiring the government to first obtain a warrant from a neutral
judge or magistrate before conducting a search. U.S. Const. amend. IV. Historically, the
Supreme Court interpreted the Fourth Amendment with an eye toward its origin as the
embodiment of the Framers’ desire to protect citizens from the arbitrary searches they
endured under British rule. See Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 303–04 (2018).
Consistent with this historical view, early decisions employed the “trespass doctrine,”
under which only physical intrusions by the government into private spaces constituted
Fourth Amendment searches that required a warrant. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347,
353 (1967) (internal quotation marks omitted); see Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 304; Olmstead
v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 457 (1928) (applying trespass doctrine), overruled by Katz,
389 U.S. at 347.
Justice Harlan’s concurring opinion in Katz v. United States signaled a transition
1
The district court only resolved whether the warrant that the government had
obtained was valid. The question of whether an unconstitutional search occurred was not
decided by the district court.
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from these early principles to modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. 2 His opinion
articulated a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard for what type of surveillance
constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. Katz, 389 U.S. at 361–62 (Harlan, J., concurring).
Under this standard, a Fourth Amendment search occurs if (1) an individual has an actual
(subjective) expectation of privacy in some activity, and (2) that expectation is one that
society recognizes as objectively reasonable. Id. at 361 (Harlan, J., concurring). Hence, any
government surveillance that infringes upon a person’s reasonable privacy expectation
necessitates a warrant. Katz thereby expanded the recognized Fourth Amendment
protections beyond mere physical intrusions. Id. at 353; accord Desist v. United States, 394
U.S. 244, 250 (1969) (“Katz for the first time explicitly overruled the ‘physical penetration’
and ‘trespass’ tests enunciated in earlier decisions of this Court.”), abrogated on other
grounds by Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314 (1987).
In the 1970s and 1980s—before the internet age—the Supreme Court placed two
key limitations on Katz’s expansion of recognized Fourth Amendment protections: the
third-party and public-surveillance doctrines. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306–09. Because
understanding the nuances of those limitations is essential to understanding the Court’s
recent decision in Carpenter, the Court in Carpenter reviewed both lines of cases in some
detail, and I do the same here.
2
Though a concurrence is not binding, the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test
articulated in Justice Harlan’s concurrence was adopted by a majority of the Court the
following year. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 9 (1968).
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The seminal third-party-doctrine cases are Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979),
and United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976). In Smith, police used a pen-register device
to collect the phone numbers the suspect dialed on his home phone. Smith, 442 U.S. at 737–
38. And in Miller, police accessed the suspect’s bank records, such as checks and deposit
slips. Miller, 425 U.S. at 437–38. In those cases, the Supreme Court held that the suspects
had no reasonable privacy expectations in the records in question because the documents
were unrevealing business records that the suspects had voluntarily conveyed to third
parties. See Smith, 442 U.S. at 737, 740–42; Miller, 425 U.S. at 442–43.
The analysis in those cases was twofold and found its roots in Justice Harlan’s Katz
concurrence. First, Smith and Miller reasoned that individuals have no subjective privacy
expectation in the phone numbers they dial or in their bank records because the “nature of
those records” is that they are “business records” that reveal little personal information.
Carpenter 585 U.S. at 308–09 (first citing Smith, 442 U.S. at 742–43; and then citing
Miller, 425 U.S. at 440–43). The Court in Smith, for instance, stressed the pen registers’
“limited capabilities”: the pen registers did “not acquire the contents of communications,”
nor reveal the caller and call recipient’s “identities, nor whether the call was even
completed.” Smith, 442 U.S. at 741–42 (emphasis omitted); accord Miller, 425 U.S. at 440,
442 (stating that the records were “not confidential communications but negotiable
instruments . . . in commercial transactions”).
Second, and relatedly, the Court held in both cases that society did not recognize a
“reasonable” (or objective) privacy expectation in such unrevealing business records that
individuals voluntarily provide to third parties. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 309 (“When
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Smith placed a call, he voluntarily conveyed the dialed numbers . . . by exposing that
information . . . in the ordinary course of business.” (quoting Smith, 442 U.S. at 744(cleaned up))); Miller, 425 U.S. at 443.
Nevertheless, Smith qualified its analysis with an eye toward the future. It specified
that, if a day should come when our subjective expectations of privacy change due to
“influences alien to well-recognized Fourth Amendment freedoms,” then the subjective-
expectation requirement would have “no meaningful role” in ascertaining the bounds of
the Fourth Amendment. Smith, 442 U.S. at 740 n.5. Instead, “a normative inquiry would
be proper.” Id. Likewise, Justice Marshall’s dissent in Smith voiced an argument that
Carpenter would later echo: disclosure to a phone company or bank is not meaningfully
voluntary in modern society. See id. at 749–51 (Marshall, J., dissenting).
In two decisions from the 1980s, the Supreme Court placed a second limitation on
Katz. This second limitation centers upon differences in how Katz applies in public versus
private spaces. In United States v. Knotts, the Court held that police did not conduct a
search for Fourth Amendment purposes when they used a beeper—that is, a radio
transmitter . . . which emits periodic signals that can be picked up by a radio receiver”—to
keep a vehicle in view while they followed behind it “on public thoroughfares” during one
trip. United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 277, 281 (1983). The Court reasoned that
because the suspect’s movements were visible to anyone who wanted to look, police could
have obtained the same information without the beeper—by physically following him—so
the suspect had no reasonable privacy expectation in those public movements. Id. at 281–
82.
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In so holding, the Court stressed that the beeper was a rudimentary technology that
merely “augment[ed]” the visual “sensory faculties” that officers had at “birth.” Id. at 282,
285. Thus, Knotts “was careful to distinguish between the rudimentary tracking facilitated
by the beeper and more sweeping modes of surveillance.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306.
Knotts, like Smith, also turned an eye to the future: the Court presciently qualified that
should “twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen” become “possible,” then “different
constitutional principles may be applicable.” Id. at 306–07 (quoting Knotts, 460 U.S. at
283–84 (cleaned up)).
The Court distinguished Knotts in its subsequent decision in United States v. Karo,
468 U.S. 705 (1984). In that case, police used a beeper to track a container as it moved
between private residences and commercial lockers. Id. at 708–10, 714. The Court held
that, unlike the public surveillance at issue in Knotts, the use of a beeper to surveil activity
within a private residence—a location closed to public view—constituted a Fourth
Amendment search. Id. at 714–16.
The upshot of cases like Smith, Miller, Knotts, and Karo was that individuals had
Fourth Amendment rights where they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that they
could forfeit those reasonable privacy expectations by voluntarily conveying a business
record to a third party, or by traveling in public where police could use rudimentary tools
to surveil them.
However, as technology quickly advanced in the ensuing decades and enabled
police to surreptitiously collect unprecedented levels of information, the Supreme Court
began curtailing the third-party and public-surveillance doctrines to ensure that the
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exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s protections did not swallow the whole. In doing so,
the Supreme Court ensured that the Fourth Amendment remained a firm bulwark against
government overreach.
In Kyllo v. United States, the Court held that police use of a thermal-imaging device
to monitor heat waves emanating from inside a home is a Fourth Amendment search, even
though police deployed the device from a public street outside the home. Kyllo v. United
States, 533 U.S. 27, 32 (2001). The Court rested its holding on its recognition that, even
though the device was deployed in a public space, it nonetheless allowed police to “explore
details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical
intrusion.” Id. at 40.
Next, in United States v. Jones, the Court grappled with “more sophisticated
surveillance of the sort envisioned in Knotts and found that different principles did indeed
apply.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 307 (citing United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 404–05
(2012)). The Jones Court held that the police’s installation and use of a Global Positioning
System (“GPS”) tracking device to monitor the location of a suspect’s vehicle for 28 days
constituted a search. Jones, 565 U.S. at 404. Although Justice Scalia’s opinion for the five-
justice majority rested only on traditional trespass principles, five other justices authored
or joined concurrences concluding that the GPS monitoring was a search under the Katz
reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test—even though the intrusion only captured public
movements. See id. at 413–18 (Sotomayor, J., concurring); id. at 419–26 (Alito, J.,
concurring in the judgment). The concurring justices noted that, as compared to the one-
trip beeper intrusion in Knotts, the GPS intrusion in Jones was longer in duration and
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conducted with more precise and comprehensive technology. See id. at 415–16
(Sotomayor, J., concurring); id. at 427–30 (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment).
Four concurring justices believed the longer duration of the GPS tracking rendered
it a search because it constituted “a degree of intrusion that a reasonable person would not
have anticipated” and thus violated reasonable expectations of privacy. Id. at 430 (Alito,
J., concurring in the judgment). That is, because police employing traditional investigative
methods could not typically tail a suspect in public for a month straight like they did using
GPS in Jones, such investigations violate societal expectations and therefore constitute
Fourth Amendment searches. Id. at 429–30 (“In the pre-computer age, the greatest
protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor statutory, but practical.”).
For the fifth concurring justice, Justice Sotomayor, even a short-term GPS search
violated a reasonable privacy expectation because the technology’s “unique attributes” set
it apart from the rudimentary beeper in Knotts. Id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Most
famously, she reasoned that because GPS technology “generates a precise, comprehensive
record” of a person’s public movements, it “reflects a wealth of detail about her familial,
political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” which violates our deepest
privacy expectations. Id. Justice Sotomayor further pointed out that a short GPS search is
cheaper, easier to use, and more concealable than conventional surveillance methods—
attributes that allow technologies like GPS to “evade[] the ordinary checks that constrain
abusive law enforcement practices.” Id. at 416. Additionally, she noted, GPS technology
permits the government to “store” and “efficiently mine” records of an individual’s
movements “years into the future.” Id. at 415. For these reasons, she warned, even a short
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GPS search could chill First Amendment freedoms and “alter the relationship between
citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” Id. at 416(quotation omitted). Finally, she lamented that the third-party doctrine is “ill suited to the
digital age,” in which people reveal intimate information during “mundane tasks” without
expecting their devices to enable “covert surveillance of their movements.” Id. at 417 &
n.*.
Two years later, the Court again demonstrated its awareness that modern technology
calls for a more nuanced Fourth Amendment analysis. In Riley v. California, it held that
police must obtain a warrant to look through the contents of an arrestee’s cell phone during
an arrest, even though police may generally conduct brief searches of an arrestee’s person
without a warrant. Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 385–86 (2014). The Court recognized
that a cell phone contains a much greater wealth of sensitive information than would be
revealed by a traditional physical search, signaling that privacy rights in digital information
must be thought of differently. Id. at 395–96.
Thus, in each of these seminal cases, the Supreme Court grappled with how to
maintain constitutional privacy protections against police use of or access to encroaching
technologies. And, in the majority opinions in most of these cases and in the Jones
concurrences, the Court recognized that traditional Fourth Amendment principles were ill-
suited to combating the realities of modern technology.
B.
All this case law, demonstrating the Court’s growing recognition of the profound
impact of technological advancements on Fourth Amendment rights, led up to the Court’s
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2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States. While building on all that came before it,
Carpenter marked a “[s]ea [c]hange” in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as it pertains to
“a person’s digital information.” Matthew Tokson, The Aftermath of Carpenter: An
Empirical Study of Fourth Amendment Law, 2018–2021, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1790, 1799–
1800 (2022) [hereinafter Tokson, The Aftermath of Carpenter].
In Carpenter, the Court held that a police intrusion into seven days of the
defendant’s historical cell-site-location-information (“CSLI”) records, which produced
two days’ worth of data, constituted a Fourth Amendment search. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at
302, 313. CSLI records are created when cell phones connect to nearby cell towers, which,
in Carpenter, occurred at the start and end of the defendant’s incoming and outgoing calls.
Id. at 302. The cell-site records were maintained by wireless companies, id. at 306, which
raised the possibility that the third-party doctrine would apply. And indeed, below, the
Sixth Circuit had “held that [the defendant] lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in
the location information collected by the FBI because he had shared that information with
his wireless carriers.” Id. at 303. In other words, the Sixth Circuit took a view very similar
to that of the majority here, asking only whether the information in question had been
voluntarily conveyed in some manner to a third party.
But the Supreme Court reversed. In so doing, it acknowledged that the third-party
doctrine is an increasingly tenuous barometer for measuring an individual’s privacy
expectations in the digital era. Instead, the Court laid the foundation for a new, multifactor
test to be used to determine whether a government intrusion using digital technologies
constitutes a search.
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The Carpenter Court began by reiterating the Katz test: the Fourth Amendment
protects against intrusion into the sphere in which an individual has a reasonable
expectation of privacy. Id. at 304. It then explained that, while “no single rubric” defines
what constitutes a reasonable privacy expectation, the Court’s analysis must always be
“informed by historical understandings of what was deemed an unreasonable search when
the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Id. at 304–05 (cleaned up). These historical
understandings, according to the Court, have a few “guideposts”: “the [Fourth]
Amendment seeks to secure the privacies of life against arbitrary power,” “to place
obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,” and, most importantly, to
“assure preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the
Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Id. at 305 (cleaned up).
The Court emphasized that it has kept those “Founding-era understandings in mind”
when considering “innovations in surveillance tools.” Id. Pointing to the examples of Kyllo
and Riley, detailed above, the Court explained that its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence
has evolved in step with technological developments: “As technology has enhanced the
Government’s capacity to encroach upon areas normally guarded from inquisitive eyes,
this Court has sought to [preserve historical privacy protections].” Id. (quoting Kyllo, 533
U.S. at 34) (cleaned up); see id. (noting that the Court “rejected in Kyllo a ‘mechanical
interpretation’ of the Fourth Amendment” to protect individuals from advancing
technology (quoting Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 35)); id. (pointing to its “recogni[tion]” in Riley that
“the ‘immense storage capacity’ of modern cell phones” rendered a cell phone search
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fundamentally different from a traditional, physical search of an arrestee’s person (quoting
Riley, 573 U.S. at 393)).
With that background, the Court turned to consider the CSLI intrusion at bar. It
quickly concluded that the sort of digital data at issue—“personal location information
maintained by a third party”—“does not fit neatly” into any existing line of Fourth
Amendment jurisprudence. Id. at 306. Instead, this data “lie[s] at the intersection” of the
third-party doctrine (Smith and Miller) and public-surveillance cases (Knotts and Jones).
Id. Both lines of cases would seemingly “inform our understanding of the privacy interests
at stake,” id., but neither squarely applies because this kind of data constitutes a
“qualitatively different category” of information, id. at 309.
The Court next summarized those two lines of inapplicable cases, id. at 306–09, and
then explicitly “decline[d] to extend” the third-party doctrine to CSLI—even though CSLI
data is maintained by third-party companies—because CSLI records are “qualitatively
different” from the types of information that had been at issue in its earlier third-party cases
(such as phone numbers and bank records). Id. at 309 (emphasis added); see also id. (noting
that police surveillance using CSLI is a “new phenomenon”); id. (emphasizing the “unique
nature” of CSLI and the “novel circumstances” of the case); id. at 313 (noting “seismic
shifts in digital technology”); id. at 314 (calling CSLI a “distinct category of information”);
id. (stressing that “[t]here is a world of difference” between the Smith and Miller records
and CSLI records); id. at 318 (“CSLI is an entirely different species of business record.”).
“After all,” the Court expounded, “when Smith was decided in 1979, few could have
imagined a society in which a phone goes wherever its owner goes, conveying . . . not just
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dialed digits, but a detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements.” Id. at
309.
In so declining to extend the third-party doctrine, the Court rejected the notion that
there is “a straightforward application of [that] doctrine” to police use of data like CSLI.
Id. at 314. To the contrary, the Court held that applying the third-party doctrine to the CSLI
in Carpenter would have constituted “a significant extension of [the doctrine] to a distinct
category of information.” Id. Accordingly, it warned that courts would be remiss to
“mechanically” apply old theories like the third-party doctrine to novel records like CSLI.
Id. (“In mechanically applying the third-party doctrine to this case, the Government fails
to appreciate that there are no comparable limitations on the revealing nature of CSLI.”).
After concluding that no existing Fourth Amendment doctrine applied neatly to such
a digital innovation, the Carpenter Court applied a new framework based on the historical
understandings of privacy protections that it had described and concluded that the CSLI
obtained “was the product of a search” that required a warrant. Id. at 310; see id. at 309–
13. Though the Court did not state explicitly, “here is the applicable test,” it clearly
delineated the considerations that compelled its decision. Specifically, the Court identified
four primary aspects of CSLI that rendered it “qualitatively different” from the traditional
sorts of records sought, and forms of surveillance used, by police—its comprehensiveness,
its retrospective capabilities that allowed for historical tracking, the intimacy of the
information it reveals, and its ease of access (i.e., the cost and efficiency) for police. Id. at
309–13. Because those four considerations rendered CSLI unique and violated historical
understandings of Fourth Amendment protections, the Court concluded that the suspect
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maintained a reasonable privacy expectation in his CSLI data, and so the intrusion
constituted a Fourth Amendment search. Id. at 313.
In so holding, the Court’s analysis followed the reasoning of the concurrences in
Jones, which likewise argued that the GPS intrusion in that case was a search not due to
trespass, but because it violated historical privacy expectations. E.g., id. at 310–11 (first
citing Jones, 565 U.S. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); and then citing Jones, 565
U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring)). The Carpenter Court adopted the same
considerations that the Jones concurrences, and particularly that of Justice Sotomayor,
proposed: the intrusion was comprehensive, intimate, retrospective, and efficient. Compare
id. at 309–13, with Jones, 565 U.S. at 415–16 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (discussing same
qualities), and id. at 429–30 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment) (discussing efficiency).
Based on those considerations, the Court concluded that the CSLI intrusion violated
the defendant’s reasonable-privacy expectation. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 313. Then, in a
separate section of the opinion, the Carpenter Court further distinguished Smith and Miller
by explaining that the conveyance of CSLI is also not voluntary. Id. at 313–16.
Leading scholars agree that Carpenter created a factor-based test derived from those
considerations, though they disagree on which factors are the most important or mandatory.
E.g., Paul Ohm, The Many Revolutions of Carpenter, 32 Harv. J.L. & Tech. 357, 363, 369
(2019) (recognizing Carpenter created “new, multi-factor test” to analyze an individual’s
reasonable privacy expectation against intruding technology and “herald[ed] a new mode
of Constitutional analysis”); Susan Freiwald & Stephen W. Smith, The Carpenter
Chronicle: A Near-Perfect Surveillance, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 205, 219 (2018) (multifactor
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analysis was “clearly central” to the Court’s holding); Tokson, The Aftermath of Carpenter,
supra, at 1830 (describing the “Carpenter factors” and concluding from a survey of cases
that “[a] multifactor Carpenter test has begun to emerge from the lower court[s]”). In
reaching this conclusion, scholars rely on the Court’s analysis and its concluding sentence,
which reads: “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and
comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact
that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of
Fourth Amendment protection.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 320. In my view, such a factor-
based examination is the correct interpretation of the Court’s opinion.
Again, central to the Court’s analysis was one overarching principle: the need to
maintain historical Fourth Amendment protections against expanding police surveillance
capabilities. Throughout its analysis, Carpenter extensively emphasized that the
government historically could not conduct intrusions as comprehensive, retrospective,
intimate, and efficient as those made possible by technological advancements like CSLI.
See, e.g., id. at 304–05 (stating the Fourth Amendment analysis with respect to digital data
must be “informed by historical understandings” of reasonable searches (quotations
omitted)); id. at 305 (discussing historical expectations); id. at 312 (retrospective
information was traditionally “unknowable”); id. at 320 (stating that the police’s use of
CSLI infringed upon the Framers’ intent in enacting the Fourth Amendment).
This rationale reflects the Court’s understanding that rapid technological advances
have created shifts “in kind and not merely in degree from the technology of the past.”
Ohm, supra, at 399. These shifts required the Court to adjust its analysis of the Fourth
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Amendment to “preserv[e the] degree of privacy . . . that existed when the Fourth
Amendment was adopted,” as it has with technological changes in the past. Carpenter, 585
U.S. at 305 (quoting Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 34); see id. at 305–06 (describing this philosophy
in the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and citing cases); id. at 318 (“When
confronting new concerns wrought by digital technology, this Court has been careful not
to uncritically extend existing precedents.”); see also Orin S. Kerr, The Digital Fourth
Amendment: Implementing Carpenter 10, 16–19 (USC Law Legal Studies Paper No. 18-
29) (describing this phenomenon in the Court’s jurisprudence as an “equilibrium-
adjustment”); Denae Kassotis, The Fourth Amendment and Technological Exceptionalism
After Carpenter: A Case Study on Hash-Value Matching, 29 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media
& Ent. L.J. 1243, 1302 (2019) (explaining that Riley and Carpenter reflect the Court’s
understanding of the exceptional nature of technology and adaptation of the law to protect
privacy).
Put simply, the Court declined to extend existing doctrines to exempt CSLI from
Fourth Amendment protections based on the principle that it first recognized decades
earlier: previously unimaginable technology that reveals unprecedented amounts of
personal information requires new rules. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 310–14 (citing the Jones
concurrences and rejecting the “mechanical” application of old doctrines); accord Riley,
573 U.S. at 393 (stating that comparing a physical search to a cell phone search is like
“saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon”).
Thus, “[t]he beating heart” of Carpenter “is its deep and abiding belief in the exceptional
nature of the modern technological era.” Ohm, supra, at 399.
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To sum up, the Court concluded that “personal location information maintained by
a third party” lies at the intersection of the public-surveillance and third-party cases, but
that neither theory “neatly” applies. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306. Because the nature of such
data is “unique,” “an entirely different species,” “qualitatively different,” and represents a
“seismic shift[]” in technology, the Court squarely declined to apply the third-party
doctrine to it. Id. at 309, 313, 318. Instead, the Court adopted a new test: it identified four
qualities (comprehensiveness, retrospectivity, intimacy, and ease of access) that render
CSLI fundamentally different from the records that police could traditionally obtain
without a warrant, and it also noted that the act of sharing CSLI with the third-party
wireless company departed drastically from that of sharing older forms of records. And
because of those fundamental differences, the Court held that the defendant maintained a
reasonable expectation of privacy in his CSLI records, notwithstanding that they were
shared with a third party.
To that end, the Court also employed a normative analysis of each factor. That
analysis did not rest solely on the facts of the intrusion in that specific case nor assess
society’s empirical expectations of privacy. Rather, the Court focused on the inherent
nature of the data collected, its potential as technology advances, and whether such
capabilities should be constrained by the Fourth Amendment. E.g., id. at 313 (in analyzing
comprehensiveness, disregarding the actual precision of the CSLI intrusion at bar and
stating that “the rule the Court adopts must take account of more sophisticated systems that
are already in use or in development” (cleaned up)); see also id. at 311 (concluding that
CSLI revealed intimate information, without assessing what information the data actually
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revealed about the defendant); Ohm, supra, at 386 (explaining that Carpenter adopted a
normative analysis of each factor that focused on the capabilities of CSLI as a category of
information).
Consequently, a faithful application of Carpenter requires lower courts to adapt
traditional Fourth Amendment principles to safeguard historical constitutional rights
against steadily infringing technologies. To be sure, Carpenter provided factors that are
relevant to that analysis without resolving which of those factors are mandatory and which
should enjoy greater weight. But the Court clearly considered the factors in their totality,
with an eye toward maintaining historical expectations of privacy.
II.
A.
A faithful reading of Carpenter—not to mention common sense—compels the
conclusion that when the police obtained Chatrie’s Location History data, they engaged in
a Fourth Amendment search. That conclusion is evident upon evaluating how the
Carpenter factors apply to the Location History intrusion in this case.
1.
The first factor that Carpenter identified was the comprehensiveness of the
intrusion, focusing on CSLI’s near-perfect surveillance capabilities. Carpenter, 585 U.S.
at 311–12. The Court looked at this factor from two dimensions: the depth and the breadth
of the intrusion.
Regarding depth, the data collected in this case and in Carpenter was extremely
comprehensive, involving a deep intrusion into each user’s privacy rights. But the intrusion
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into Chatrie’s Location History was even more comprehensive than the intrusion in
Carpenter because Location History is collected more often and is more precise than CSLI
as described in Carpenter.
In Carpenter, the Court was concerned that CSLI provided “near perfect
surveillance” of its owner and created a “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled”
record. Id. at 309. The Carpenter Court concluded that the CSLI intrusion provided nearly
perfect surveillance because, unlike police tracking of a vehicle—which a person exits and
which remains parked outside—a cell phone remains permanently attached to its owner
and “faithfully follows” them into private areas. Id. at 311–12 (“A cell phone—almost a
‘feature of human anatomy’—tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner.” (citation
omitted) (quoting Riley, 573 U.S. at 385)); see id. at 311 (noting many people even use
their cell phones in the shower).
So too here. As with CSLI, Location History tracks a smartphone’s location, so it
likewise provides “near perfect surveillance” of its user. Id. at 311–12. And like CSLI,
Location History is collected with sufficient frequency to be able to faithfully track the
user’s movements.
Location History, however, provides even more detailed surveillance than CSLI
because it is collected much more often. In Carpenter, CSLI only captured Carpenter’s
location when he affirmatively placed or received a call—no call, no data. Id. at 302. But
the Court also recognized that in recent years, companies had begun collecting CSLI from
other “routine data connections.” Id. at 301. In line with its normative approach, the Court
considered those advancements in its analysis, stating that with CSLI, the suspect has
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“effectively been tailed every moment of every day for” as long as the company maintained
its records (in that case, five years). Id. at 312.
While the “every moment” description was not accurate to Carpenter’s own CSLI
data—and was likely at least a slight exaggeration even considering the advancements in
CSLI technology by the time of the Carpenter decision 3—it does essentially capture what
we know of Location History data because that technology automatically tracks users
every two minutes. United States v. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d 901, 908 (E.D. Va. 2022). So
with Location History, police can reconstruct a user’s movements with startling precision.
The numbers in this case bear this out: through Location History, the police were able to
collect an average of about 76 data points on each person surveilled in just two hours.
Compare that to CSLI, which collected only about 101 data points on Carpenter in a full
day. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 302. Thus, Location History data is even more “detailed,
encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled” than CSLI. Id. at 309.
Additionally, Location History implicates even deeper privacy concerns than the
CSLI in Carpenter because not only does it collect far more data points about each user,
but also it is markedly more precise. In Carpenter, the data placed the defendant within a
“wedge-shaped sector,” id. at 312, that ranged from “a dozen” to “several hundred” city
3
According to Carpenter, “[w]hile carriers have long retained CSLI for the start
and end of incoming calls, in recent years phone companies have also collected location
information from the transmission of text messages and routine data connections.”
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 301. The opinion does not clarify how frequently the collection of
data from “routine data connections” occurs.
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blocks and was “up to 40 times more imprecise” in rural areas, id. at 324 (Kennedy, J.,
dissenting) (noting CSLI is even less precise than GPS).
Here, by contrast, the district court found that “Location History appears to be the
most sweeping, granular, and comprehensive tool—to a significant degree—when it comes
to collecting and storing location data.” Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 907. In fact, Location
History can hunt down a user’s whereabouts within meters, and even discern elevation,
locating the specific floor in a building where a person might be. Id. at 908–09.
Most critically, it is a fundamental legal principle that any intrusion into a
constitutionally protected space receives Fourth Amendment protection. E.g., Karo, 468
U.S. at 714–15 (search occurred where government monitored a beeper inside “a private
residence, a location not open to visual surveillance”); Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 33–35 (search
occurred where government used device to monitor radiation through home’s walls). And
Location History data is so granular that it can pinpoint and continuously follow a device
inside protected spaces. For example, the geofence in this case covered over 17 acres and
encompassed a nearby church. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 918. The district court found
that the geofence could have also captured a hotel, “several units of [an] apartment
complex,” “a senior living facility,” and “what appear to be several residences” for one
hour at Step One, and it had no geographic limits for an additional hour in Step Two. 4 Id.
4
As a reminder, Step One of the geofence warrant “‘compel[led] Google to disclose
a de-identified list of all Google users’ whose Location History data indicates were within
the geofence during a specified timeframe.” Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 914–15 (cleaned
up). At Step Two, law enforcement could compel Google to provide additional location
information for a narrowed list of users “beyond the time and geographic scope of the
(Continued)
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at 923. It appears nearly impossible to limit geofences to public spaces because Location
History can inaccurately sweep more ground than police requested, 5 and Google does not
set geographic limits on Step Two in standard geofence warrants. Id. at 916, 922–23.
Consequently, every geofence in a developed area could potentially reveal
information “that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion into a
constitutionally protected area.” Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 34 (internal quotation marks omitted);
see, e.g., Jake Snow, Cops Blanketed San Francisco In Geofence Warrants. Google Was
Right to Protect People’s Privacy, ACLU of N. Cal. (Jan. 7, 2024),
https://www.aclunc.org/blog/cops-blanketed-san-francisco-geofence-warrants-google-
was-right-protect-peoples-privacy [https://perma.cc/2Y7S-DRBG] (analyzing all geofence
warrants from January 2018 to August 2021 in San Francisco and finding that—in that area
alone—the geofences covered hundreds of residences, twelve places of worship, seven
medical sites of care, and other private spaces). That crosses a “bright” line: police need a
warrant. Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 40.
original request.” Id. at 916. Google “imposes no geographical limits on this Step 2 data.”
Id. (quotation marks omitted).
Additionally, Google has no “firm policy as to precisely when a Step 2 request [has]
sufficiently narrow[ed]” the list of users captured in Step One for whom police could
request more data at Step Two. Id.
While Location History is more precise than CSLI, it is not infallible. The district
5
court found that the “largest confidence interval” for a user located within the geofence
had a radius of roughly 387 meters—more than twice as large as the geofence. Chatrie,
590 F. Supp. 3d at 922–23. Thus, the court found that the “Geofence Warrant could have
captured the location of someone who was hundreds of feet outside the geofence.” Id. at
922. The court found that the government did not craft the geofence to account for these
inaccuracies. Id. at 930–31.
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The majority opinion dismisses this concern, concluding that even though the
instant geofence intrusion did surreptitiously enter several constitutionally protected
spaces—including residences—this issue must be saved for future cases because the
intrusion did not actually enter Chatrie’s home, and he therefore lacks Fourth Amendment
standing to challenge it on that ground. 6 Maj. Op. at 19 n.17, 30–31, 31 n.26. But that
analysis is incorrect. The rules are simple: a person has Fourth Amendment standing if they
have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the thing searched. Whether a person has a
reasonable expectation of privacy in certain data is inextricable from the data’s
capabilities.
Citizens have a fundamental privacy expectation in non-public spaces, particularly
their homes. E.g., Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 34; Karo, 468 U.S. at 714–15. Accordingly, all citizens
would reasonably expect privacy in data that continuously and retrospectively tracked their
movements in these protected spaces with remarkable precision, even locating the specific
room they occupy within a secure area.
It follows then that Chatrie would have a reasonable expectation of privacy from
such an intrusion that could capture a church and residences at Step One and was boundless
at Step Two. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 914–16. Indeed, police executed a search that
would have captured Chatrie’s home or other constitutionally protected space if it was in
the Step One boundary, or if he happened to travel there during Step Two. It does not matter
6
I note that it is unclear from the record whether the geofence intrusion indeed
reached inside Chatrie’s home or his constitutionally protected spaces.
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that Chatrie happened to stay outside of constitutionally protected spaces during a search
that would have otherwise captured those spaces. See Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325
(1987) (“A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a
turntable.”).
The Kyllo majority rejected the similar argument that the search of heat waves
emanating from the home did not implicate the Fourth Amendment if the search did not
catch more intimate information. That argument, Justice Scalia explained, was not only
“wrong in principle,” but also “impractical” because “no police officer would be able to
know in advance” whether his surveillance will “pick[] up ‘intimate’ details—and thus
would be unable to know in advance whether it is constitutional.” Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 38–
39. Likewise, here, when police executed an intrusion that would capture private spaces,
they had no crystal ball to predict whether Chatrie would enter those spaces during the
intrusion.
It was also the case in Carpenter that no facts showed that the CSLI intrusion
entered the defendant’s own protected spaces. But that did not affect his standing. The
Court simply held that because the CSLI intrusion had the capability to follow the
defendant into any of numerous sorts of sensitive spaces, the intrusion was unlawfully
intimate. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311 (“A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond
public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters,
and other potentially revealing locales.” (emphasis added)). That is, the Court focused on
the surveillance tool’s capabilities during the intrusion as opposed to the specific facts of
each intrusion. Because an intrusion into two days’ worth of Carpenter’s CSLI data met
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the Carpenter factors, Carpenter had a reasonable privacy expectation in that data and thus
had standing. In so holding, the Carpenter Court affirmatively instructed lower courts to
consider the potential reach of each intrusion, without regard to whether the intrusion
indeed invaded the defendant’s own private space under traditional Fourth Amendment
standing principles. Id. The government thus cannot circumvent the Constitution merely
because, by sheer luck, its target did not stray from the safe zone.
In short, the intrusion into Chatrie’s Location History satisfies the depth portion of
Carpenter’s first factor because it provides nearly perfect surveillance of its owner and
creates a “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled” record of the owner’s
movements. Id. at 309. And the intrusion was so broad that it did in fact enter private areas.
This factor weighs strongly in favor of holding that the police conducted a Fourth
Amendment search.
2.
Next is the intrusion’s breadth (the second part of factor 1), which should be
considered alongside its retrospective capabilities (factor 2) because the two are related.
Regarding breadth, the Carpenter Court was particularly concerned that wireless
companies retained CSLI data for five years and stored that information for millions of
people. This consideration was intertwined with the retrospective quality of the data: that
is, because the wireless companies retained CSLI data for five years, police could
“reconstruct a person’s [past] movements,” such that the person “has effectively been tailed
every moment of every day for five years.” Id. at 312; see id. at 313 (“[S]eismic shifts in
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digital technology . . . made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter’s location but also
everyone else’s . . . for years and years.” (emphasis added)); id. at 315 (same).
This breadth deviated from historical privacy expectations, leading the Court to
conclude the data was therefore qualitatively different from data the Court had previously
concluded did not implicate the Fourth Amendment. Carpenter highlighted that police
historically could not “reconstruct a person’s [past] movements” without facing “a dearth
of records and the frailties of recollection.” Id. at 312. But with CSLI, police could “travel
back in time to retrace a person’s whereabouts” with precision, not only in the recent past,
but going back years. Id. Not only that, but CSLI data was also available for “400 million
devices in the United States”—not just those of suspects—so “this newfound tracking
capacity runs against everyone.” Id. Unlike with the trackers in Knotts or Jones, “police
need not even know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual [using
CSLI], or when.” Id.
Location History raises the same breadth and retrospectivity concerns: at the time
of the geofence intrusion at issue here, Google collected and retained Location History
records from the time Location History was enabled, which could have taken place years
prior. This means that the data obtained in a geofence intrusion is pulled from a preexisting
database of users’ past movements, empowering police to time travel for each intrusion.
Thus, each user has “effectively been tailed” since they activated Location History. Id.; see
also Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 909. Plus, like CSLI, Location History data is available
for “numerous tens of millions” of unsuspecting Google users. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at
907.
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Yet, geofence intrusions are even broader than the intrusion in Carpenter because
there is no limit on the number of users police can include in a geofence. With CSLI, police
at least had to provide a specific phone number to search, so they had to identify a criminal
suspect before they could pry into his or her historical CSLI data. By stark contrast,
geofence intrusions permit police to rummage through the historical data of an unlimited
number of individuals, none of whom the police previously identified nor suspected of any
wrongdoing. Indeed, the very point of the geofence intrusion is to identify persons whose
existence was unknown to police before the search.
Geofence intrusions are accordingly low-value fishing expeditions. So, even when
police do obtain a warrant for a geofence, such a warrant is uncomfortably akin to the sort
of “reviled” general warrants used by English authorities that the Framers intended the
Fourth Amendment to forbid. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 303 (quoting Riley, 573 U.S. at 403)
(describing roots of the Fourth Amendment); see also Steagald v. United States, 451 U.S.
204, 220 (1981) (“The general warrant specified only an offense . . . and left to the
discretion of the executing officials the decision as to which persons should be arrested and
which places should be searched.” (citations omitted)). Now that the majority has
eliminated the warrant requirement in cases like this one, police do not even need to
“specif[y] . . . an offense” before they can conduct a geofence intrusion. Id.It follows that the breadth portion of the first factor (comprehensiveness) and the
second factor (retrospectivity) weigh in favor of concluding that the geofence intrusion in
this case was a search under Carpenter.
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3.
Turning to the third factor, intimacy, Carpenter concluded that because CSLI
captured “near perfect surveillance,” it uncovered information that was personally
revealing and thus intimate. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 312. As a result, this factor also favored
the conclusion that the Fourth Amendment applied. Id. at 311–12. The same is true here.
Just like CSLI, Location History provides near-perfect surveillance, enabling the
government to reconstruct a “detailed and comprehensive record of [Chatrie’s]
movements” for two hours. Id. at 309. The government could learn a great deal about
Chatrie in those two hours: the geofence intrusion occurred in “a busy part of the Richmond
metro area” between 3:50 pm and 5:50 pm. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 919, 925. That is
when most people leave work or school and travel to their next destinations, carrying their
phones into intimate spaces and engagements. A two-hour search could tour a person’s
home, capture their romantic rendezvous, accompany them to any number of medical
appointments, political meetings, strikes, or social engagements, or otherwise begin
constructing their afternoon and early-evening routines. See J.A. 145 (Google LLC’s
amicus brief filed in the district court, arguing that its users maintain a reasonable
expectation of privacy in their Location History against a geofence intrusion, for there is
“nothing limited” about a 2-hour geofence intrusion).
This is not a mere supposition. At the suppression hearing, Chatrie’s defense
counsel demonstrated that the identities of innocent users caught up in the geofence were
easily deduced from the anonymized data that Google provided in Step 2. Chatrie, 590 F.
Supp. 3d at 923–24. To make this showing, the defense took three users who were caught
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in the geofence—that is, innocent individuals who just happened to be near the site of the
robbery—and demonstrated that the data the police received from Google pursuant to its
warrant retroactively tailed those individuals into private spaces: all three traveled to or
from residences, one traveled to a school, and one traveled to a hospital. Id. at 923.
Chatrie’s expert also showed how deductions from this information allowed him to easily
uncover those individuals’ identities. Id. at 923–24.
And, as noted above, it does not matter whether the intrusion here revealed intimate
information about Chatrie personally. Carpenter did not mention any facts that the CSLI
search revealed about the defendant in that case—rather, the Court assessed only whether
the search could reveal intimate information unrelated to legitimate police needs.
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311. The search here certainly could—and did.
Simply put, there can be no doubt that “[a]s with [the] GPS information” in Jones,
or the CSLI in Carpenter, “the time-stamped data” from a geofence intrusion “provides an
intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but
through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.’” Id.
at 311 (quoting Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring)); accord Smith, 442
U.S. at 751 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (recognizing that because people “value” privacy in
basic activities, “the prospect of unregulated governmental monitoring [related to which
phone numbers they dial] will undoubtedly prove disturbing even to those with nothing
illicit to hide”). Additionally, because the geofence intrusion could enter constitutionally
protected spaces, it by default could reveal intimate information. Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 37.
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It is also of little importance that the intrusion here was of a shorter duration than in
Carpenter. The government in Carpenter conducted two intrusions: it requested records of
Carpenter’s movements over both a seven- and 152-day period, which respectively
revealed two and 127 days of data. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 302. The Court stated that the
127 days of data provided an “intimate window into a person’s life” that revealed the litany
of associations that Justice Sotomayor identified in her Jones concurrence. Id. at 311 (citing
Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring)). But the 127-day figure was nowhere
near outcome-determinative: Carpenter ultimately held that only two days of CSLI data
was intimate enough to constitute a search. Id. at 310 n.3. Even the two-day figure is not
dispositive because the Court expressly limited its holding to the facts before it, and thus
did not address whether a shorter search would invoke constitutional scrutiny. Id.Moreover, the Court’s intimacy analysis relied on Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence in
Jones, which argued that short-term searches are no less intimate by virtue of their limited
duration. See id. at 311 (citing Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring)).
Indeed, Carpenter only mentioned two temporal periods in the main text of the
opinion—it stressed repeatedly that CSLI records and stores data for “years,” id. at 312,
313, 315, 319, and concluded that tracking over “127 days” creates a comprehensive
record, id. at 311—while holding in a footnote that the much shorter duration of two days
of data collection still constituted a search, id. at 310 n.3. So, the Court clearly focused on
the character of the search, rather than its length. Location History operates the same way:
like CSLI, Location History records and stores data for years, and it likewise provides
nearly perfect, comprehensive surveillance. Thus, the fact that the intrusion here lasted
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only two hours does not preclude a finding that it revealed intimate information or
constituted a search.
Finally, the majority opinion cites Knotts and this Court’s en banc holding in
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, in which this Court held
that Baltimore’s weeks-long aerial-surveillance program constituted a Fourth Amendment
search. The majority relies on these cases for the principle that only prolonged tracking
like that in Beautiful Struggle—as opposed to “short-term tracking of public movements”
like in Knotts—implicates the Fourth Amendment. Maj. Op. at 26 (quoting Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle v. Balt. Police Dep’t, 2 F.4th 330, 341 (4th Cir. 2021)). In the majority
opinion’s view, the geofence intrusion at bar is like the one-trip beeper intrusion in Knotts,
and hence not a search. Id. at 19–20.
But the majority opinion’s simplistic comparison to Knotts is inapt because it
ignores the glaring differences between the beeper surveillance in Knotts and the vastly
more sophisticated Location History technology here. Specifically, Knotts involved brief
real-time public surveillance with a “rudimentary” technology that only augmented
officers’ natural-born senses. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306 (describing Knotts). By contrast,
a geofence intrusion involves a retrospective (for years), continuous, nearly perfect
surveillance technology, which enters private areas and captures information historically
unavailable to uninvited human senses.
As elaborated on further below, infra at 93–97, Knotts and Beautiful Struggle
involved the tracking of only public movements. Yet, as Carpenter held, intrusions into
CSLI are categorically different from intrusions that only capture public movements. See
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Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311–12. For all the reasons I’ve explained, the same is true of the
Location History data in this case. The geofence intrusion here was so broad that it could
have followed users through dozens of non-public spaces, including residences, religious
spaces, and senior living facilities. Thus, the intrusion did not merely constitute a “short-
term tracking of public movements.” Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 341 (emphasis added).
In sum, Location History can reveal intimate information about an individual, so the
third Carpenter factor favors a finding that police obtaining Location History data must
obtain a warrant.
4.
The fourth Carpenter factor, ease of access, also favors this conclusion. Geofences,
like CSLI searches, are “easy, cheap, and efficient compared to traditional investigative
tools.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311. As with CSLI, police conduct a geofence intrusion
“[w]ith just the click of a button” that enables them to scour the continuous locations of
numerous people in any area at any time—“at practically no expense.” Id.; see also Ohm,
supra, at 369 (noting that cell phone location tracking is almost twice as cheap as GPS
tracking, while GPS tracking is 28 times cheaper for police than covert pursuits). In fact,
geofence intrusions are remarkably “easy” because Google does most of the work for the
police.
In considering this factor, Carpenter heeded the concerns raised in the Jones
concurrences, which cautioned against enabling powerful leaps in police surveillance
capabilities through practical advances. See Jones, 565 U.S. at 429–30 (Alito, J.,
concurring in the judgment) (“In the precomputer age, the greatest protections of privacy
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were . . . practical.”); id. at 416 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (warning that government
abuse would ensue from the unrestrained police power to use advanced and efficient,
relatively low-cost technology). In his Jones concurrence, Justice Alito emphasized that if
a digital search would have been exceptionally demanding and costly for police to replicate
in the pre-digital age, then society does not reasonably expect that search to occur. Id. at
429–30 (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment). A geofence intrusion certainly would have
been impossible to replicate in the pre-internet age. So, it violates society’s privacy
expectations.
The fourth factor therefore favors the conclusion that police engage in a search when
they obtain geofence data.
5.
The final factor to consider is voluntariness. To be sure, it is unclear whether
Carpenter requires us to consider voluntariness at all. That’s because the Court expressly
concluded that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his CSLI records
and that the third-party doctrine did not apply before it ever addressed voluntariness. See
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 313. However, in its summation at the end of the opinion, the Court
stated that “[i]n light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and
comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact
that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of
Fourth Amendment protection.” Id. at 320 (emphasis added). The reference to the
“automatic nature of [the] collection” seemingly refers to voluntariness. This ambiguity is
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expected: Carpenter deliberately left open to interpretation the precise contours of its
analysis. See, e.g., Tokson, The Aftermath of Carpenter, supra, at 1798, 1800.
At minimum, the Carpenter Court’s discussion of voluntariness in a separate
rebuttal section—after the Court had already concluded the intrusion was a search—
establishes that it is the least important factor in the overall analysis. See Matthew Tokson,
Smart Meters as a Catalyst for Privacy Law, 72 Fla. L. Rev. F. 104, 112 (2022) (“Most
scholars view involuntariness not as a requirement but as merely one factor among many
examined in Carpenter. The Court’s discussion of the voluntariness issue . . . was mostly
confined to a single paragraph in a lengthy opinion that largely focused on [other]
factors[.]” (footnote omitted) (collecting scholarship)); Freiwald & Smith, supra, at 219
(observing that Carpenter established a multiprong test made up of only the four primary
factors already discussed).
Assuming arguendo that voluntariness is a mandatory factor to be considered in the
analysis of whether a police intrusion into digital records constitutes a search, it is clear for
reasons explained below that Chatrie’s sharing of Location History was not meaningfully
voluntary. Additionally, even if this factor slightly leans in the government’s favor, this
factor’s contribution is marginal and insufficient to sway the balance of the factor-based
test.
Carpenter rejected an extension of the third-party doctrine to CSLI intrusions,
noting that CSLI differs from the records in Smith and Miller in part because the
conveyance of CSLI is involuntary. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 315. That is, while Smith and
Miller held that individuals had no reasonable privacy expectations in their bank records
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and phone numbers dialed because they voluntarily (and often physically) conveyed those
records to third-party companies, Carpenter reasoned that individuals do not “voluntarily”
convey their CSLI data to third parties merely by using their cell phones—at least not in
any “meaningful sense.” Id.
In so concluding, the Court reasoned that cell phones are a ubiquitous part of modern
life. And the Court reasoned that individuals convey CSLI to wireless companies by simply
turning on their cell phones and connecting to the wireless network. After that, any cell
phone activity generates CSLI. 7 Id. So, because cell phones are prevalent in modern
society, and cell phone use necessarily creates CSLI without much action or awareness by
the user, the Court concluded the conveyance of CSLI data is not “meaningful[ly]”
voluntary. Id.
The sharing of Location History is likewise not “meaningful[ly]” voluntary. Id.
First, like CSLI, once Location History is enabled, it is always generated and collected. In
fact, Location History is even less voluntarily conveyed because it is conveyed
automatically every two minutes, while CSLI is only conveyed when there is phone activity
like an incoming text. And users are even less likely to be aware of the conveyance of
Location History than they are CSLI because once users enable Location History, it is
7
Again, the government in Carpenter only collected the defendant’s CSLI data at
the start and end of calls, and wireless companies likewise had long only collected CSLI
data in those increments. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 301, 302. But the Court recognized that
“in recent years,” companies had also begun collecting CSLI from the transmission of text
messages and routine data connections. Id. at 301. Although those advancements did not
apply to Carpenter himself, the Court considered them in its analysis of voluntariness.
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automatically conveyed across all devices on which a user is logged into Google, even
when the user has deleted the Google app through which they opted into Location History.
Thus, the ongoing conveyance of Location History is more automatic and less voluntary
than CSLI.
Compare that to the conveyances in Smith and Miller, in which individuals were
much more aware that they were conveying information to third parties. In Smith, the
individuals physically dialed each number they conveyed, and the phone company sent
monthly bills listing some of the calls that the companies had collected. Smith, 442 U.S. at
742 (noting users “see a list of their long-distance (toll) calls on their monthly bills”). And
of course, in Miller, individuals had to physically convey checks and deposit slips to the
bank. Miller, 425 U.S. at 442; e.g., Alyssa Bentz, First in Online Banking, Wells Fargo
History (last visited Apr. 1, 2024), https://history.wf.com/first-in-online-banking/
[https://perma.cc/FRT2-XHRR] (noting that in 1984—eight years after Miller was
decided—internet banking software had not been developed so customers “still had to input
their [bank] transactions by hand”). The nature of such a physical conveyance differs
drastically from a cell phone’s automatic conveyance every two minutes.
Second, a substantial number of individuals generate Location History, just like
CSLI. To be sure, Google’s Location History service tracks fewer Americans than does
CSLI. Compare Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 907 (Google did not provide specific numbers
but revealed it tracks “numerous tens of millions” of users), with Carpenter, 585 U.S. at
300 (noting that “[t]here are 396 million cell phone service accounts in the United States,”
which is greater than the number of people). And the majority contends that the fact “[t]hat
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two-thirds of active Google users have not enabled Location History is strong evidence”
that opting in is voluntary. Maj. Op. at 22.
But the use of technology is not per se voluntary just because the adoption of that
technology is not as ubiquitous as the cell phone. Tens of millions of citizens opt into using
technologies like Fitbit and Apple watches, health apps, journal apps (such as iPhone’s
built-in Notes App), apps for tracking menstrual cycles, ChatGPT, and smart cars, and
those technologies record the most intimate, retrospective information about them. See,
e.g., William Gallagher, Apple Watch Sets New US Record, now Owned by 30% of iPhone
Users, Apple Insider (Oct. 14, 2022), https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/10/14/apple-
watch-sets-new-us-record-now-owned-by-30-of-iphone-users [https://perma.cc/DJ2P-
LR7B] (100 million active users of Apple Watch in 2022); Flo Health Inc. Company
Update, March 2022, Flo Health (Mar. 16, 2022), https://flo.health/newsroom/flo-
company-update [https://perma.cc/N7Q6-V3UF] (220 million downloads of popular
menstrual-cycle app); Krystal Hu, ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base -
analyst note, Reuters (Feb. 2, 2023), https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-
record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/ [https://perma.cc/R63F-
EAPC] (100 million monthly users of ChatGPT within two months of launching).
Google alone has 1.5 billion users worldwide. See NYU Technology Law & Policy
Clinic Amicus Brief at 5 n.4. Even if only one-third opt into Location History, that is a
whopping 500 million people, many of whom are Americans. And millions more opt into
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substantially identical location tracking through other technologies. 8 Far be it from me to
tell hundreds of millions of Americans that they have waived their privacy rights with the
State just because these invasive technologies are not fully automatic or because not every
single user utilizes them.
Third, the gloss of an opt-in checkbox does not render the enabling of Location
History collection “meaningful[ly]” voluntary. 9 Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 315. This one click
8
While Location History is Google-specific, millions of Americans use
substantially similar technologies offered by other companies. In Carpenter, the Court
referred to the total number of cell phone service accounts in the United States, as opposed
to the number of accounts with the specific wireless company that the defendant used.
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 300, 302. Thus, the correct analysis in assessing whether a
technology is widely adopted and hence “indispensable to participation in modern society,”
id. at 315 (quotation omitted), is to consider the total number of users of substantially
similar technologies.
9
According to the majority, a user must (1) enable location sharing on their device;
(2) enable the “Location Reporting” feature; (3) sign into Google; and (4) opt into the
Location History setting. But the district court made no mention of, nor any findings of
fact regarding, the enabling of location sharing or Location Reporting (the majority’s
requirements 1 and 2). See Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 907–12. Rather, the district court
concluded that users enable the Location History feature solely by opting into Location
History and logging into their Google accounts.
Even if all four steps were required to enable Location History, the record indicates
that these steps may be accomplished in the first few moments of setting up and using an
Android device. Chatrie used a standard Android cell phone with Google’s operating
system. That type of phone comes out of the box with the location-sharing setting enabled
by default, thus automatically satisfying requirement (1). Next, the record indicates that by
enabling Location History, users can also automatically opt-in to Location Reporting. So,
requirements (2) and (4) are not necessarily two separate steps; they can be completed with
one click.
Likewise, one of the first steps in setting up an Android is to log into or create a
Google account. Indeed, if users choose not to log into Google, they cannot use most of
the Android’s features such as downloading apps, music, and games; accessing Google
(Continued)
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does not meaningfully inform users that they are surrendering “a comprehensive dossier of
[their] physical movements.” Id.
Instead, the pop-up text that appears when Google prompts users to opt in explains
only that Location History “[s]aves where you go with your devices,” and that “[t]his data
may be saved and used in any Google service where you were signed in to give you more
personalized experiences. You can see your data, delete it and change your settings at
account.google.com.” Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 911–12. Below that, the screen provides
the options: “NO, THANKS” or a brightly highlighted “TURN ON.” Id. at 912. It also
presents a small expansion arrow, which, if tapped by the user, displays more information
about Location History. 10 But a user does not need to click the expansion arrow to opt into
Location History. They can just click “TURN ON.” Through that click, Location History
is enabled.
Maps; or syncing services like Calendar and Contacts. The district court found that Google
repeatedly prompts its millions of Android users to opt-in to Location History both upon
initial set-up and then “multiple times across multiple apps.” Id. at 908–09 (cleaned up).
For example, “Google may prompt the user to enable Location History first in Google
Maps, then again when he or she opens Google Photos and Google Assistant for the first
time.” Id. at 909 (emphasis added). Thus, requirement (3) is also satisfied quickly and
without reference to Location History.
10
The expansion arrow reveals the following additional information: “Location
History saves where you go with your devices. To save this data, Google regularly obtains
location data from your devices. This data is saved even when you aren’t using a specific
Google service, like Google Maps or Search. . . . This data may be saved and used in any
Google service where you were signed in to give you more personalized experiences.”
Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 912.
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The district court noted that this pop-up “did not detail . . . how frequently Google
would record [a user’s] location . . . ; the amount of data Location History collects
(essentially all location information); that even if he ‘stopped’ location tracking it was only
‘paused’ . . . ; or, how precise Location History can be (i.e., down to twenty or so meters).”
Id. at 936 (cleaned up). Nor did it inform users that Google would automatically and
precisely track their location even when they were not doing anything on their phones, or
that this tracking would occur across all devices on which they were logged in—not just
those on which they opted in—even when they have deleted the respective Google app. Id.
at 909–12 (quoting terms); see id. at 909 n.11, 913–14 & n.16 (discussing wide criticism
of Google because its Location History opt-in and opt-out procedures were unclear to
users); cf. Jones, 565 U.S. at 417 n.* (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (“[S]mart phone[]
[owners] do not contemplate that these devices will be used to enable covert surveillance
of their movements.”).
I agree with the district court’s conclusion that the warnings provided by Google are
“limited and partially hidden” and that it is “plain that these ‘descriptive texts’ are less than
pellucid.” Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 936. Simply put, the pop-up box lacked sufficient
information for users to knowingly opt into Location History. Smartphone users are
bombarded with opt-in buttons and terms of service in their daily phone use. Few actually
read the terms, and, without reasonably clear descriptions, most users do not understand
what they are approving. See Jones, 565 U.S. at 417 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (pointing
out that Americans are revealing intimate information during “mundane” tasks); Research
Shows Mobile Phone Users Do Not Understand What Data They Might Be Sharing, Sci.
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Daily (May 9, 2023),
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230509122057.htm [https://perma.cc/54
V5-Y49P] (discussing study that showed a substantial portion of users do not understand
how phone and app tracking works).
Further, while the majority opinion argues that users can delete information, see
Maj. Op. at 20, that is easier said than done. To delete their Location History, a user has
“only one option”: they must visit the proper website, locate their timeline, and delete their
data. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 913. And the deletion of past Location History data will
not turn off the collection of additional Location History data. As the district court
indicated, the process of enabling, pausing, and deleting Location History is not transparent
to users. See id. at 913–14, 936; see also id. at 913 (finding that Google falsely told users
that pausing Location History will limit the functionality of Google services).
For instance, the district court quoted an internal email by a Google staffer who
expressed their frustration that the Location History interface is “difficult enough that
people won’t figure . . . out” how to turn off the feature. Id. at 913. The district court
determined that the sentiment in that email is “certainly not inconsistent with the record
before the Court.” Id. What’s more, around the time Chatrie enabled the feature, Google
faced criticism from members of Congress, the media, and Norway’s Consumer Protection
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Committee for the lack of transparency in how users enable or disable Location History.
See id. at 909 n.11; id. at 913–14; id. at 913 n.16. 11
The explosive growth of the usage of new technologies, such as smartphones,
illustrates a certain level of comfort among the American populace in entrusting personal
information to technology companies like Google. But that does not mean such trust
extends to the State or that the American populace has ceded its reasonable expectation of
privacy in that information. Americans might expect that companies provided with their
information will, at most, barrage them with advertisements. The State, by contrast, holds
a monopoly on licit violence and detainment. It is a grave misjudgment to conflate an
individual’s limited disclosure to Google with an open invitation to the State. See Jones,
565 U.S. at 418 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (“I would not assume that all information
voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason
alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.”); Smith, 442 U.S. at 749 (Marshall, J.,
dissenting) (“Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those
11
The majority opinion argues that the evidence is “nonexistent” that pausing or
deleting Location History is easier said than done. Maj. Op. at 35 n.30. But the majority
provides no evidence of its own that pausing and deleting Location History is a reasonable
process for users, beyond stating conclusively that users can figure it out. Id. at 20–21, 35
n.30. And to the contrary, criticism from the news media, congressional members, a
consumer-protection group, and Google staffers themselves regarding the difficulty of
pausing or deleting Location History certainly constitutes evidence of the same. Moreover,
though the district court did not conduct fact-finding on this issue, it did conclude that such
criticisms appeared consistent with the record and that Google’s warnings were “less than
pellucid.” Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 936, 913.
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who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need
not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes.”).
As noted, Carpenter endorses a normative understanding of modern technology and
with it a normative understanding of voluntariness. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 315
(concluding that “in no meaningful sense does the [cell phone] user voluntarily assume the
risk of turning over a comprehensive dossier of his physical movements” (emphasis added)
(cleaned up)). Although bank records and the dialing of phone numbers are similarly
central to participation in modern society, the Court in Carpenter opted to treat the
conveyance of CSLI as uniquely involuntary. This demonstrates a recognition that modern
technology, particularly that which tracks an individual’s location, warrants heightened
privacy requirements.
In sum, even if voluntariness might be considered as a factor in the Carpenter test,
the conveyance of Location History data to third parties is not meaningfully voluntary. And
even assuming arguendo that it is marginally more voluntary than the conveyance of CSLI
was in Carpenter, the balance of the Carpenter factors nonetheless strongly supports the
conclusion that the geofence intrusion constituted a search.
***
Because the balance of the Carpenter factors shows that Location History is
qualitatively different from the records that police could traditionally obtain without a
warrant, Chatrie had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his Location History data, and
the government conducted a search by accessing it. In the context of this novel technology,
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the third-party doctrine is wholly inadequate to defeat that reasonable expectation. While
geofence intrusions may be a boon to law enforcement, they still require a warrant.
B.
My friends in the majority rest their contrary holding on Section III(B) of Carpenter,
in which the Court rebutted the government’s insistence that Smith and Miller should
resolve the case. In so doing, the majority decision holds that the proper analysis under
Carpenter is a direct analogy to the third-party doctrine established by Smith and Miller.
See Maj. Op. at 22 (“The third-party doctrine . . . squarely governs this case.”).
But Carpenter affirmatively rejected a “straightforward application” of Smith and
Miller, establishing that analogizing the third-party cases to “qualitatively different”
records like CSLI and Location History is misguided. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 309, 314; see
id. at 314 (“The Government . . . is not asking for a straightforward application of the third-
party doctrine, but instead a significant extension of it to a distinct category of
information. . . . In mechanically applying the third-party doctrine to this case, the
Government fails to appreciate that there are no comparable limitations on the revealing
nature of CSLI.” (emphasis added)); see also id. at 313 (rejecting Government’s argument
that “cell-site records are fair game because they are ‘business records’ created and
maintained by the wireless carriers”).
Thus, Smith and Miller do not control here because the Carpenter Court rejected a
simplistic analogy to those cases when dealing with advanced digital surveillance. Further,
even if such an analogy were proper, the nature of the records collected here is
incomparable to those in third-party cases like Smith and Miller so the application of the
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third-party doctrine fails. Indeed, the third-party doctrine has two requirements: first, the
nature of the documents sought by police must be unrevealing business records like those
in Smith and Miller, and second, the conveyance to the third-party company must be
meaningfully voluntary. As Carpenter emphasized, “Smith and Miller . . . did not rely
solely on the act of sharing. Instead, [those decisions] considered ‘the nature of the
particular documents sought’ to determine whether ‘there is a legitimate “expectation of
privacy” concerning their contents.’” Id. at 314 (quoting Miller, 425 U.S. at 442). So even
if the conveyance of Location History was voluntary, the Carpenter Court repeatedly
stressed that the nature of location data derived from a smart phone—such as the CSLI data
in Carpenter, or the Location History data here—is simply incomparable to that sought in
Smith and Miller.
In analyzing the “nature of the particular documents sought” in this case, the
majority decision instead concludes that the geofence intrusion here was “far less revealing
than that obtained in Jones, Carpenter, or Beautiful Struggle and more like the short-term
public movements in Knotts.” Maj. Op. at 19–20.
But that’s an improper comparison. Instead, the proper comparison in applying the
third-party doctrine would be to the bank documents and pen register in the third-party
cases, Smith and Miller—not to the public-surveillance cases cited in the majority decision.
E.g., Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 313–14 (comparing CSLI to the documents in Smith and
Miller); id. at 306 (distinguishing public surveillance and third-party doctrine cases); Smith,
442 U.S. at 741–43 (addressing nature of records); Miller, 425 U.S. at 440–43 (same). The
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majority opinion’s failure to grapple with Smith and Miller, while insisting that “[t]he third-
party doctrine . . . squarely governs this case,” Maj. Op. at 22, is telling.
As discussed above, the Carpenter Court took great pains to emphasize that the
nature of technology like CSLI is “unique,” “an entirely different species,” “a qualitatively
different category” of information, and data that represents a “seismic shift[]” in
technology as compared to the phone numbers dialed and bank records in Smith and Miller.
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 309, 313, 318. And as my analysis has shown, the first four
Carpenter factors demonstrate that the “nature” of Location History, like CSLI, differs by
orders of magnitude from the records at issue in the third-party cases.
Beyond that, Carpenter rejected the application of the third-party doctrine by
explaining that the third-party cases relied on the unrevealing nature of the documents
sought. Id. at 313–14. For instance, Carpenter explained, the Smith Court stressed that the
phone numbers lacked any content or “identifying information” in holding there was no
reasonable expectation of privacy. Id. at 314 (cleaned up); see also Smith, 442 U.S. at 741.
By contrast, Location History, like the CSLI in Carpenter, reveals that information.
Thus, “[s]uch a chronicle implicates privacy concerns far beyond those considered in Smith
and Miller.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 315. Carpenter emphasized that unless courts
recognize this difference, they will “fail[] to appreciate that there are no comparable
limitations on the revealing nature of CSLI.” Id. at 314. So too here. Carpenter hence
rejected the view that the nature of personal-location data matches that of traditional bank
or phone records, urging courts to consider the context of Smith and Miller’s analyses.
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Thus, even if the conveyance of Location History was voluntary, the first prong of
the third-party-doctrine test—the nature of the records conveyed—is nowhere near
satisfied and the application of the doctrine here fails. Accordingly, Carpenter compels the
conclusion that the police intrusion into Chatrie’s Location History data constituted a
Fourth Amendment search. 12
III.
Before concluding, I respond to what the majority opinion structures as a lengthy
separate opinion that responds to my dissent, Maj. Op. at 23–35.
Extrajudicially, the majority’s separate opinion claims that Carpenter’s factor-
based test was “concocted” from thin air. Id. at 24. Instead, the majority opinion believes
that (1) Carpenter should be read narrowly to apply only the “established” privacy
principles pronounced in Jones, id. at 25; (2) employing a factor-based test would
“abandon[]” all pre-Carpenter case law, id. at 23, 31; and (3) despite the Carpenter Court’s
warnings about applying old tests to new technologies, the third-party doctrine can
nonetheless definitively settle this case, id. at 31–35. All three beliefs are unsound.
12
The government did obtain a warrant in this case. But I agree with the lower court
that the warrant here was so lacking in particularity and probable cause that it was invalid.
Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 927. And the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement
does not apply because the warrant lacked any indicia of probable cause. The government’s
proposed justification—that the robber used a cell phone and a cell phone could have
Google Location History turned on—is extremely broad. Also, the government did not
limit the scope of the warrant to an area reasonably related to the bank robbery.
Accordingly, a reasonable officer could not have relied on the warrant in good faith. I
would thus grant Chatrie’s Motion to Suppress the evidence that resulted from the geofence
search.
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A. Carpenter Established a Multifactor Analysis
In an attempt to restructure the Supreme Court’s holding in Carpenter, the majority
folds that decision into Jones, saying that Jones had established certain rules regarding the
privacy implications of digital technology and first identified the relevant factors, and that
Carpenter merely applied those rules and factors. See id. at 24 (claiming that Carpenter
simply “appl[ied] the principles announced in the location-tracking cases”); id. at 25
(asserting that Jones considered unique qualities of GPS technology like that it is “detailed,
encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled,” and Carpenter merely “applied” those
“established principles” to CSLI). So, with that, the majority declares that Carpenter
accomplished nothing new.
But that’s wrong. As we acknowledged in Beautiful Struggle, Jones “was ultimately
decided on trespass principles.” Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 341. Indeed, the Jones
majority analyzed only the trespass doctrine, expressly declining to consider the privacy
implications of a GPS intrusion under Katz. Jones, 565 U.S. at 406–07. Significantly, it
was the concurring justices in Jones who pointed out the unique attributes of GPS
technology and argued that the Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test could have
decided the case.
Specifically, in his concurring opinion, Justice Alito, joined by three other Justices,
argued that the long-term GPS intrusion in Jones violated Katz because society did not
historically expect police to conduct such prolonged surveillance on public streets due to
practical limitations like cost. Id. at 429–30 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment). And it was
Justice Sotomayor who, writing alone, discussed several unique attributes of GPS—that it
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is precise, comprehensive, intimate, retrospective, and cheap—and argued that those
attributes implicate the Katz analysis for even short-term GPS surveillance. Id. at 415–16
(Sotomayor, J., concurring). So, it was the concurrences in Jones—and particularly that of
Justice Sotomayor, writing alone—that recognized the unprecedented power of modern
location-tracking technology and argued for the need to adjust Fourth Amendment
protections to maintain traditional privacy expectations against such technologies. But,
prior to Carpenter, that view was not binding precedent.
Carpenter hence broke new ground: it placed the principles proposed in the Jones
concurrences (the four-justice opinion of Justice Alito coupled with the concurring opinion
of Justice Sotomayor) into a majority opinion and articulated how location data obtained
from a cell phone is different from traditional modes of surveillance. As explained, the
Carpenter majority derived most of its factor-based test from Justice Sotomayor’s lone
concurrence in Jones. In addition, Carpenter marked the first time that the Court in a
majority opinion recognized a privacy interest in the “whole of [a person’s] physical
movements,” and it weighed those factors to analyze that interest. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at
310. So, Carpenter marked a new era of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence even as it built
on the cases that came before it, setting forth how we must think about the Fourth
Amendment in the context of modern technology.
Thus, the majority opinion’s claim that Carpenter merely “applied established
principles” is wrong. Maj. Op. at 25. And to confirm that, we need to look no further than
the Carpenter opinion itself, which explicitly stated that its decision “d[id] not fit neatly
under existing precedents.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 306. That statement alone should end
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this discussion but in the interest of completeness, I will respectfully address the remainder
of the majority opinion’s complaints about Carpenter’s multifactor analysis.
The majority opinion scoffs that the factor-based test does not exist. Maj. Op. at 23–
26. But this dissent’s analysis of the test comes directly from Carpenter’s text, in which
the Supreme Court took great pains to make clear that the third-party doctrine cannot
extend to novel technologies like CSLI that have the qualities the Court identified. The
Court’s efforts were apparently in vain, however, because the majority opinion continues
to “mechanically apply[] the third-party doctrine” in defiance of the Supreme Court’s
repeated and express commands not to do so. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 314.
Remarkably, while alleging that this dissenting opinion’s analysis lacks any basis
in Carpenter, the majority opinion simultaneously complains that this dissent quotes
Carpenter too much—particularly the Court’s language stressing the distinct nature of
CSLI and directing courts to move away from past doctrine when analyzing such
technology. See Maj. Op. at 24 & n.21. That’s just poppycock. Instead of engaging with
the substance of the Supreme Court’s quoted language that forms most of Carpenter’s
analysis, the majority answers by essentially saying we should ignore that language.
Still further, the majority opinion posits that the “‘factors’ identified by [this] dissent
. . . were not factors at all” but were instead “attributes” of CSLI that “implicated the
privacy interest recognized by the concurring Justices in Jones.” Id. at 25. That is a
distinction without a difference. In other words, although the majority quibbles about how
to characterize the Court’s analysis (factors vs. attributes), it recognizes that those factors
(or attributes) are derived directly from Carpenter’s text. For example, the majority agrees
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that the CSLI in Carpenter implicated the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test because
the CSLI had “immense capabilities”: that is, it “provided a ‘comprehensive record’ of [the
defendant’s] movements, which revealed intimate details of his life . . . . And the
retrospective nature of CSLI and the ease by which it could be accessed only augmented
these privacy concerns, for no comparable record of a person’s movements was available
to law enforcement in a pre-digital age.” Id. (emphases added) (quoting Carpenter, 585
U.S. at 309). Because CSLI had each of those qualities, the majority opinion concedes,
“CSLI warranted Fourth Amendment protection.” Id.
In so conceding, the majority opinion applies the exact factors I recognize in this
dissent, pointing out that, post-Carpenter, we consider comprehensiveness, intimacy,
retrospectivity, and ease when determining whether a digital intrusion violates the Fourth
Amendment. So, whether we call the qualities that we weigh “attributes” or “factors” is
immaterial. As explained, supra at 48–49, the Carpenter Court did not expressly state that
it created a factor-based test; it identified the qualities of CSLI that informed its holding.
The legal community—including three of the dissenting Justices on the Carpenter Court,
see Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 340 (Kennedy, J., joined by Thomas and Alito, JJ., dissenting)—
has concluded that those qualities created a factor-based test.
So the factor-based test is certainly not the “creative[]” project of this dissenting
opinion, as the majority suggests. Maj. Op. at 32 n.27; accord id. at 24 (characterizing this
dissent’s “pronouncements” as “bold” and its “framework” as “novel”); id. (criticizing this
dissent for “combin[ing] . . . ingredients” from Carpenter to “create[] a new inquiry from
scratch” in order to—“voila!”—find that a search occurred); id. at 35 (arguing that this
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dissent’s test is “novel” and “unwieldy”). Instead, it represents the scholarly consensus that
Carpenter diverged from existing precedent and created a new, multifactor analysis. In
addition to the leading authorities this dissenting opinion has already cited, see supra at
49–50 (first citing Ohm, supra, at 363, 369; then citing Freiwald & Smith, supra, at 219;
and then citing Tokson, The Aftermath of Carpenter, supra, at 1830), numerous other
scholars and authorities to have considered the issue have concluded the same, see, e.g.,
Sherwin Nam, Bend and Snap: Adding Flexibility to the Carpenter Inquiry, 54 Colum. J.L.
& Soc. Probs. 131, 132 (2020) (stating that Carpenter “broke new ground in the
constitutional right to privacy in electronic data” and employed a “five-factor” test); Helen
Winters, An (Un)reasonable Expectation of Privacy? Analysis of the Fourth Amendment
When Applied to Keyword Search Warrants, 107 Minn. L. Rev. 1369, 1381, 1390 (2023)
(stating Carpenter “marked a new period of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence” and
described “several factors relevant to its decision”); Antony Barone Kolenc, “23 and
Plea”: Limiting Police Use of Genealogy Sites After Carpenter v. United States, 122 W.
Va. L. Rev. 53, 71–72 (2019) (concluding that Carpenter “alter[ed] Fourth Amendment
law” by recognizing a privacy interest in the “whole of a person’s physical movements,”
and “balanced five factors” to analyze that interest); Allie Schiele, Learning from Leaders:
Using Carpenter to Prohibit Law Enforcement Use of Mass Aerial Surveillance, 91 Geo.
Wash. L. Rev. Arguendo 14, 17–18 (2023) (pointing out “Carpenter’s focus on five central
factors”); Nicole Mo, If Wheels Could Talk: Fourth Amendment Protections Against Police
Access to Automobile Data, 98 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 2232, 2251 (2023) (recognizing factors);
Luiza M. Leão, A Unified Theory of Knowing Exposure: Reconciling Katz and Carpenter,
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97 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1669, 1684 (2022) (same); Matthew E. Cavanaugh, Somebody’s
Tracking Me: Applying Use Restrictions to Facial Recognition Tracking, 105 Minn. L.
Rev. 2443, 2468 (2021) (same).
Finally, the majority opinion laments that the multifactor analysis only works if
Carpenter created a test “from scratch.” Id. at 24. But that is far from the case.
Rather, Carpenter articulated the factors as a way to analyze whether an individual
has a reasonable privacy expectation in their digital location data. So, the Court applied the
long-standing Katz standard, but it adapted the Katz analysis for digital data like CSLI to
preserve privacy protections against encroaching technologies—which, as Carpenter
explained, the Court has done throughout its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Carpenter,
585 U.S. at 304–05 (noting that the Court “ha[s] kept . . . Founding-era understandings [of
privacy] in mind when applying the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance
tools” and citing cases in which the Court “rejected . . . a ‘mechanical interpretation’ of the
Fourth Amendment” for novel surveillance tools (citations omitted)).
Thus, Carpenter’s analysis began by providing this context and explaining the
Court’s enduring understanding that expansive technologies require heightened
protections. Id. at 304–05. In so doing, the Court situated the remainder of its analysis
within that context. And the Court repeated those sentiments throughout the opinion. The
majority opinion ignores these critical aspects of Carpenter.
Carpenter also acknowledged the Court’s existing third-party-doctrine precedent
but explained that the Carpenter factors render the “nature” of CSLI markedly different
from the nature of the documents in the third-party cases. Id. at 308–10. In addition, the
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Court’s opinion incorporated ideas about technology and privacy from past cases like
Kyllo, Riley, and the Jones concurrences. E.g., id. at 310–13. For these reasons,
Carpenter’s multifactor analysis was “informed” by case law and adapted for a new era.
Id. at 305.
But not to be deterred even in a world ever transfigured by technology, the majority
opinion apparently wants to scold the Carpenter Court for stepping beyond the shadows of
Knotts, Smith, and Miller when faced with surveillance technology that is not only different
in degree, but different in kind. I must disagree, because the Supreme Court’s analysis in
Carpenter aptly reflects the traditional evolution of law. That is, the Supreme Court wisely
moved beyond its decades-old precedent to reiterate that it is not required to robotically
copy and paste precedent when dealing with novel issues arising from changing
technology.
Nonetheless, the majority opinion contends that the Supreme Court could not have
possibly “abandoned” Knotts, Jones, Smith, and Miller in the face of new technology. Maj.
Op. at 23, 31. I agree that the Supreme Court did no such thing. That’s because Jones was
resolved under trespass principles; Knotts involved surveillance of a suspect during one
trip on public roads using what Carpenter called a “rudimentary” beeper, Carpenter, 585
U.S. at 306; and Smith and Miller involved police obtaining bank records and dialed phone
numbers, which Carpenter emphasized were “a world” apart from data like CSLI and
Location History, id. at 314.
Thus, Carpenter did not “abandon” Knotts, Smith, and Miller—instead, it explained
that they do not neatly apply to technologies like CSLI and Location History. In so holding,
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Carpenter acknowledged a simple truth: the digital age does not strip us of our
Constitutional protections.
And this principle is not what the majority calls a radical departure because it is no
more revolutionary than the novel acknowledgments in Katz that the “Fourth Amendment
protects people, not places,” or in Riley that our cell phones are not merely external
attachments, but intimate extensions of our private lives. Id. at 304–05 (first quoting Katz,
389 U.S. at 351; and then citing Riley, 573 U.S. at 393). At bottom, Carpenter binds this
Court and we must follow it.
B. The Complete Third-Party Analysis, Intimacy, and Standing
The majority opinion also complains that the Location History intrusion at bar did
not reveal information as intimate as that in Carpenter and Beautiful Struggle, and that the
use of Location History is voluntary. Maj. Op. at 26–35. Relatedly, the majority opinion
reiterates that even if the intrusion entered private spaces, Chatrie lacked Fourth
Amendment standing to challenge it because, as far as we know, it did not enter his
protected spaces.
In other words, the majority opinion emphasizes two of Carpenter’s five factors
(intimacy and voluntariness)—but it ignores the remaining three factors
(comprehensiveness, in terms of both depth and breadth; retrospectivity; and efficiency),
likely because they weigh indisputably in Chatrie’s favor. It likewise ignores the other
prong of the third-party doctrine, the nature of the documents sought, which similarly
forecloses the use of that doctrine. I address the third-party doctrine before discussing
intimacy.
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1.
First, take the third-party doctrine. As the majority makes clear, it believes that the
use of Location History is meaningfully voluntary because the average user should know
from Google’s popups, which the district court called “limited and partially hidden” and
“less than pellucid,” that Google will infinitely track the user’s Location History data.
Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d at 936. But nothing in the majority opinion’s lengthy response to
my dissent addresses the first requirement of the third-party doctrine—the nature of the
documents collected. The third-party doctrine has two requirements. First, the “nature of
the particular documents sought” must be akin to the unrevealing business records (the
phone numbers dialed and bank records) at issue in Smith and Miller. Carpenter, 585 U.S.
at 314 (quoting Miller, 425 U.S. at 442). Second, those records must be voluntarily
conveyed to the third-party business. Id.As discussed above, the majority opinion’s third-party-doctrine analysis is flawed
because it wrongly compares the “nature of the documents” at issue here to the nature of
the surveillance in Knotts (outdoor beeper surveillance), Jones (outdoor GPS-tracker
surveillance), and Beautiful Struggle (outdoor aerial surveillance), even though those cases
did not involve the conveyance of records to third parties. Rather, to properly apply the
third-party doctrine, we must compare the nature of the documents in this case to those in
the third-party doctrine cases, i.e., Smith and Miller. By instead selecting inapt
comparators, the majority opinion crafts a Frankensteinian analysis that lacks a basis in
precedent or logic. And while it insists that the third-party doctrine “squarely” applies here,
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Maj. Op. at 22, the majority opinion ignores comparisons to the documents in the third-
party doctrine’s seminal cases.
As Carpenter stressed, the nature of CSLI and Location History data today is miles
apart from that of phone and bank records in the 1980s. Because the first prong of the third-
party doctrine fails, so too does the application of the doctrine to this case. So, a
straightforward application of the doctrine mandates the conclusion that a Fourth
Amendment search occurred here.
2.
The majority opinion next relies on Beautiful Struggle, in which this Court held that
Baltimore’s weeks-long public aerial surveillance constituted a Fourth Amendment search,
to conclude that the two-hour intrusion at bar could not gather data that was sufficiently
intimate so as to implicate the Fourth Amendment. Thus, the majority opinion argues that,
unlike the longer intrusion in Beautiful Struggle, the intrusion here was too short to reveal
intimate information and thus was not a search. Maj. Op. at 26–29. In so arguing, the
majority opinion expounds on its assertion that Chatrie lacked standing to challenge the
intrusion if it did not enter his private spaces. Id. at 30–31. These arguments relate to the
majority opinion’s final objection that Beautiful Struggle did not recognize any factor-
based inquiry from Carpenter, and thus, the majority opinion reasons, one does not exist.
Id. at 25–26.
These arguments fall flat. As I explain, the intimacy discussion in Beautiful Struggle
does not foreclose a finding of intimacy here because that case involved technology that
was only capable of surveillance of public movements. And the majority opinion
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misrepresents that Beautiful Struggle did not recognize any factor-based test from
Carpenter because that opinion expressly applied the Carpenter factors.
As a threshold matter, however, the majority opinion’s argument is unclear. It
claims that Carpenter did not apply any multifactor analysis, and that Beautiful Struggle
instead established its own test: a search occurs when police “use technology to monitor
[an individual’s] long-term movements, but not when they glimpse only his short-term
movements.” Id. at 26. In other words, the majority opinion remarkably proposes that the
Fourth Amendment only considers whether an intrusion using modern technology was long
or short. But then the majority opinion informs us that “Location History has capabilities
much like GPS data and CSLI,” id. at 29, seemingly referring to the Carpenter factors,
which should be irrelevant to the supposedly sole question of an intrusion’s length. And,
as noted, in another portion of its response to my dissent, the majority opinion tellingly
applies the Carpenter factors itself. Id. at 25. In essence, the majority opinion flip-flops to
reach a desired outcome. I nonetheless respond to its arguments.
a.
The majority opinion’s argument that Beautiful Struggle forecloses a finding of
intimacy for all relatively short intrusions misconstrues the opinion and stretches it further
than the opinion can bear. To explain why Beautiful Struggle is not on point, I begin with
some background.
In Beautiful Struggle, the Court considered Baltimore’s aerial-surveillance program,
which monitored only public spaces and stored that data for forty-five days. The aerial
surveillance generally gathered hours-long chunks of surveillance during the day, and only
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showed individuals as anonymous, blurry pixels. Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 334, 340.
As a result, the government had to decipher individuals’ identities from several pieces of
captured data. Id. at 334.
The key distinction between Baltimore’s program and CSLI or Location History is
that it strictly captured public movements. The Supreme Court has long held that
individuals have a diminished privacy expectation in public spaces. See Katz, 389 U.S. at
351. As part of this diminished privacy expectation, the Court recognized in Knotts that
beeper surveillance of one public trip did not implicate the Fourth Amendment. Knotts,
460 U.S. at 285. Crucial to the Knotts Court’s holding, however, was the beeper’s
rudimentary capabilities that merely augmented human senses, such that the surveillance
mirrored that of a passerby watching the defendant on the street. See Carpenter, 585 U.S.
at 306–07.
So, in analyzing the public surveillance in Beautiful Struggle, this Court had to begin
with the tenet that one has a diminished privacy expectation in public, then to ask whether
the surveillance was so invasive as to breach that diminished privacy expectation. And, if
the intrusion was to be considered a Fourth Amendment search, it would have to be more
invasive than that in Knotts. This is where the duration of the intrusion becomes relevant.
The district court in Beautiful Struggle had determined that Baltimore’s aerial intrusion
was not a search because the program captured only chunks of public movements. Leaders
of A Beautiful Struggle v. Balt. Police Dep’t, 456 F. Supp. 3d 699, 713–14 (D. Md. 2020)
(reasoning that the intrusion could not reveal details inside of private spaces).
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But this Court reversed, holding that the forty-five-day length of the public aerial
surveillance implicated the Carpenter factors. That is, we held that because the government
gathered chunks of public aerial footage daily for weeks, the cumulative data was “detailed,
encyclopedic,” “intimate,” and “retrospective,” and broadly comprehensive because it
“recorded everyone’s movements.” Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 341–42 (cleaned up); see
id. at 345 (explaining that people reasonably expect to be seen for a short period in public,
but they do not expect longer public intrusions). And we emphasized that the weeks-long
duration of the intrusion permitted deductions by police that revealed “intimate”
information about those surveilled. Id. at 342. For all those reasons, we determined that
Baltimore’s relatively lengthy public surveillance “transcends mere augmentation of
ordinary police capabilities” and hence triggered Fourth Amendment protections. Id. at
345.
So, while this Court in Beautiful Struggle did distinguish between a short- and long-
term search, that was because the search at issue in that case covered strictly public areas.
Id. at 341. Contrary to the majority opinion’s assertions, the distinction that we drew in
Beautiful Struggle regarding the length of the search was rooted in the factors that
Carpenter identified. Its solely public sweep notwithstanding, the longer aerial intrusion
was a search because it satisfied the Carpenter factors and thus violated the surveilled
individuals’ reasonable privacy expectations. Id. at 341–42, 346 (applying factors and
concluding the intrusion was a search). If in Beautiful Struggle we believed those factors
were irrelevant, as the majority opinion now presses, then we would have simply
distinguished Knotts without saying more.
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Technology that allows only for augmented public surveillance, however, is
fundamentally different from technology that has the capacity to surveil private spaces,
like CSLI and Location History. 13 This is nothing new: the Supreme Court has long drawn
a line between public and private spaces—concluding that using a beeper to track a vehicle
for one trip on a public road is not a search, but monitoring a device within a
constitutionally protected space is subject to Fourth Amendment constraints, even if the
monitoring was brief or revealed nothing of value. Compare Karo, 468 U.S. at 714–15,
with Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 34. Unlike in public, individuals do not have a diminished privacy
expectation in private spaces. Accordingly, where a police intrusion can enter private
spaces, the short-versus-long-term distinction holds much less weight.
Relatedly, the fact that Location History can perfectly surveil private spaces
implicates one’s reasonable privacy expectation because it exceeds historical expectations
of police capabilities. In Beautiful Struggle, the Court reasoned that a short aerial intrusion
only augmented what police could traditionally capture by tailing suspects. Only public
surveillance for a longer duration amounted to “attaching an ankle monitor” to those
surveilled, Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th at 341 (cleaned up), capturing information that police
traditionally could not gather “without technology,” id. So there, only the longer intrusion
violated privacy expectations and became a search. But here, even two hours of a boundless
13
The majority opinion claims that we cannot even consider the differences in the
capacities of the technologies at issue in Beautiful Struggle and the present case because
the Location History data here only captured public movements. Maj. Op. at 31. But, as
explained above, whether a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in certain forms
of data depends on the capabilities of that data. Supra, at 58–60.
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Location History intrusion is akin to “attaching an ankle monitor” on the surveilled,
capturing information inside private spaces that were historically closed to prying police
eyes. That intrusion thus exceeds mere augmentation of human capabilities and becomes a
search, even when the duration is short. See id. at 341, 343, 345 (emphasizing that the
analysis turns on historical police capabilities).
Similarly, we also reasoned in Beautiful Struggle that it would take longer for police
to deduce intimate information about individuals whom they only follow on discrete public
trips like that in Knotts, meaning that the duration of surveillance in the public sphere is a
key component of the intimacy factor. Id. at 342–43. But an intrusion that provides near-
perfect surveillance in private spaces, like with Location History data, much more quickly
reveals one’s “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” Jones,
565 U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). So, again, the short-term and long-term
distinction is less relevant outside of the public-surveillance context.
In sum, the majority opinion errs in contending that, following Beautiful Struggle,
the only Fourth Amendment question before us is whether an intrusion was long or short.
As our analysis in Beautiful Struggle demonstrated, we must ask whether an intrusion
satisfied the Carpenter factors. While the length of the intrusion in Beautiful Struggle made
clear that it did, a shorter intrusion into nonpublic spaces could satisfy the Carpenter factors
as well—as it did here.
Next, the majority opinion argues that the geofence intrusion did not reveal intimate
information because the two-hour window could have only revealed innocuous activities
in private spaces, as opposed to scandalous or particularly sensitive activities. Maj. Op. at
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28–29. It acknowledges that the geofence indeed could have captured users “seeing a friend
for coffee, touring a housing upgrade, . . . buying a couch off of Facebook marketplace,”
or inquiring into medical services. Id. at 28. But because such innocuous activities would
not reveal individuals’ “habits, routines, and associations,” the majority opinion argues, the
intrusion was not sufficiently intimate to become a search. Id. at 28–29.
The majority opinion wrongly defines intimacy. Beautiful Struggle indeed held that
surveillance that reveals one’s “habits and patterns” is intimate. Beautiful Struggle, 2 F.4th
at 343. But, contrary to the majority opinion’s assertion, that is not the only information
that is intimate for purposes of the Fourth Amendment reasonable-expectation-of-privacy
test. Indeed, Carpenter made no mention of personal habits or patterns in its intimacy
analysis. Carpenter instead held that an “intimate window” into a person’s life is one that
reveals “his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’”
Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311 (quoting Jones, 565 U.S. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring)).
The sheer breadth of that list of associations—which the Court held contains the sacred
“privacies of life” in which one maintains a reasonable privacy expectation, id. (quoting
Riley, 573 U.S. at 403)—is telling. Of course, this Court’s decision in Beautiful Struggle
could not limit the reach of Carpenter; nor did it claim to do so. Instead, while habits and
patterns relevant in Beautiful Struggle are indeed a form of intimacy, the litany of
associations that Carpenter recognized are likewise intimate.
Because people have a reduced privacy expectation in public, it made sense that the
public surveillance in Beautiful Struggle would only violate their privacy expectation when
the surveillance was so invasive that it permitted deductions about their “habits and
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patterns,” from which police could decipher personal associations, which often manifest in
non-public spaces. Habits and patterns are intimate precisely because they reveal the
associations recognized in Carpenter. But when police can monitor individuals’ precise
movements in private spaces, the information revealed is much more intimate and likely to
reveal one’s familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations without the
need for pattern-based deductions. Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans have a
heightened privacy expectation from such intrusions.
The majority opinion’s argument that innocuous information is not intimate is
likewise unavailing. Two hours of innocuous activities in a busy urban area could certainly
reveal the targets’ associations. The Fourth Amendment has never incorporated a scandal
barometer for information that constitutes the “privacies of life.” Id. at 311.
Simply put, the majority opinion enacts a sweeping new rule: when it comes to data
like Location History, police are only required to obtain warrants for longer intrusions—
without any regard for the advancing capabilities of the surveillance technologies that
police may use or the revealing nature of the data that the police may access. This blanket
rule has no basis in Carpenter, which expressly declined to address whether a specific
duration was necessary to implicate Fourth Amendment protections. Nor could this blanket
rule find a basis in Beautiful Struggle, which addressed only police surveillance that
captured blurry public movements.
b.
In the majority opinion’s final attempt to argue that the intrusion here was not a
search, the majority reiterates its argument that Chatrie had no standing to challenge the
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intrusion if it did not enter his own private spaces. See Maj. Op. at 19 n.17, 30–31, 31 n.26.
Because the majority opinion merely repeats itself without engaging with my response,
supra at 58–60, I will not rehash this issue.
c.
Of note, the majority opinion focuses on intimacy and voluntariness in its lengthy
response to this dissent. But intimacy is only one of the factors to which the Court looked
in Carpenter. And even if the shorter duration of the intrusion in this case leads the
intimacy factor to weigh less strongly in favor of deciding that the Fourth Amendment
applies, it far from tips the scale given the immense weight of the comprehensiveness (in
breadth and depth), efficiency, and retrospectivity of Location History. The majority
opinion does not dispute that these factors apply to Location History.
As a self-provided example of “eviscerat[ing] basic and longstanding Fourth
Amendment principles,” Maj. Op. at 31 n.26, the majority opinion utterly fails to address
the geofence’s stark similarities to the reviled general warrants that the Fourth Amendment
was intended to bar—similarities that will only increase given the majority opinion’s
elimination of the warrant requirement altogether. See supra at 62. At the very least, these
historical similarities demand heightened caution here, not the majority opinion’s rigid
application of the third-party doctrine.
3.
Our Supreme Court decided Carpenter on the principle that applications of the
Fourth Amendment must evolve in step with technology to ensure that our constitutional
protections are not rendered meaningless by new means of government intrusion. Rather
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than clinging to policy preferences for pre-Carpenter precedent, the Supreme Court in
Carpenter directed courts to move past such basic analyses when considering
unprecedented surveillance technology like CSLI.
It is our duty to apply Carpenter honestly and diligently. We should not and cannot
sidestep the primary impact of a Supreme Court opinion to apply earlier decisions that are
inapplicable, and simply put, more to our own liking. To do so would undercut Carpenter
and thus, undermine our duty to faithfully guard Constitutional protections.
IV.
As a consequence of today’s majority decision, significant concerns arise regarding
the privacy rights of all Americans. That’s why Justice Sotomayor’s warning in Jones
applies here with equal relevance—rejecting the warrant requirement for technology as
cheap, readily accessible, and unprecedentedly powerful as a geofence intrusion is akin to
inviting governmental abuse. See Jones, 565 U.S. at 416 (Sotomayor, J., concurring).
Ironically, court decisions like this one could also hinder legitimate law
enforcement efforts. Shortly after oral arguments in this case, Google—apparently
predicting the majority opinion’s flawed reading of Carpenter—shut down the technology
that permits geofence intrusions, 14 thereby reducing the potential for legitimate
investigatory uses of this innovative technology, even with a warrant.
14
E.g., Cyrus Farivar & Thomas Brewster, Google Just Killed Warrants That Give
Police Access to Location Data, Forbes (Dec. 14, 2023),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-just-killed-geofence-
warrants-police-location-data/ [https://perma.cc/27JX-ANVC].
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Another consequence of today’s decision is that it could “alter the relationship
between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” Jones,
565 U.S. at 416 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (cleaned up). This is because citizens may feel
inhibited from exercising their associational and expressive freedoms, such as the right to
peacefully protest and the ability of journalists to gather information confidentially and
effectively, knowing “that the Government may be watching” them. Id.; see Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press Amicus Brief at 7–8 (noting the CIA’s track record
of “follow[ing] newsmen . . . in order to identify their sources” (citation omitted)); Smith,
442 U.S. at 751 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (“The prospect of unregulated governmental
monitoring will undoubtedly prove disturbing even to those with nothing illicit to hide.”);
see NYU Technology Law & Policy Clinic Amicus Brief at 25 (noting that “[f]orced
disclosure of membership can chill association, even if there is no disclosure to the general
public”); Ams. for Prosperity Found. v. Bonta, 141 S. Ct. 2373, 2388 (2021) (holding that
disclosure requirements risk chilling association). As a result of today’s majority opinion,
the government may surreptitiously surveil places of worship, protests, gun ranges,
abortion or drug-rehabilitation clinics, union meetings, marital counseling or AA sessions,
and celebrations of cultural heritage or LGBTQ+ pride, among numerous other types of
sensitive places or gatherings—with no judicial oversight or accountability. Without
warrants, the government is free to surveil anyone exercising their First Amendment (or
other) rights at the government’s whim—using a technology that can identify each
individual retrospectively, without any suspicion of criminal activity—and those surveilled
will be none the wiser. All of that offends the Supreme Court’s instruction that Fourth
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Amendment review must be particularly rigorous when First Amendment protections are
at risk. See Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, 436 U.S. 547, 564 (1978).
***
For the first time since the ratification of the Fourth Amendment, the government is
permitted to retroactively surveil American citizens anywhere they go—no warrant
needed—so long as it keeps its snooping to a few hours or perhaps a few days. New
technologies that collect ever-more-intimate data are becoming integral to daily life in
ways we could not have imagined even a short time ago. This fact of modern life—that we
cannot know what developments, and what risks posed by those developments, lie just
around the corner—should counsel courts to exercise humility. The Supreme Court has
guided us to safeguard against novel technologies that may enable government
infringement on constitutional rights.
That’s what we should do. At the end of the day, upholding the precious freedoms
guaranteed by our Constitution is our duty. Because the majority decision fails to honor
that duty today, I must, with great respect, dissent.
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