US Supreme Court: Requesting phone location data requires search warrant

The highest US judge, or the Supreme Court, has ruled that the police generally need a search warrant to request the location data of suspects from telecom providers. As a result, the bar for such requests is now higher.

The Associated Press writes on the basis of the current ruling that it is a “privacy victory in the digital age” as police retrieval of location data has become an important tool in criminal investigations. Five of the nine judges supported the ruling, but also said the search warrant requirement only applies to phone location data and not to other data, such as that of a bank. An order could also be omitted in an emergency.

In the current case, investigative services had obtained a court order to obtain the location data of a suspect. However, according to the American judges, they should have asked for a search warrant or search warrant. AP explains that there is a higher requirement for this, namely that probable cause must be present. In order to speak of this, strong evidence is needed.

The case concerns one of the United States’ fundamental rights, the Fourth Amendment. This protects citizens against unreasonable searches by the government. The central figure in the ruling is Timothy Carpenter, who was sentenced to 116 years in prison for robbery of stores in the states of Michigan and Ohio. Based on the data, prosecutors showed that Carpenter was close to the incident in four robberies. It can be concluded from the ruling that an average of 101 data points about the man’s location were known over a period of 127 days.