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According to a report just filed by States Newsroom, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that law enforcement searches for the location history of cellphones near crime scenes are covered by the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants to obtain the data.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers conducted a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment when they obtained cellphone location history data during an investigation into a bank robbery in Virginia. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
But for some time, Massachusetts law enforcement agencies have been operating under some of the nation's most stringent restrictions on the use of reverse-location tracking, reflecting both strong constitutional privacy protections and major changes in the way technology companies store location data.
For years, police departments across the country relied on investigative tools such as geofence warrants and cell tower data requests to identify devices that were present near the scene of a crime. While those techniques were once available in Massachusetts, a series of court decisions and evolving technology have sharply curtailed their use.
At the heart of the state's approach is Article 14 of the Massachusetts Constitution, which provides robust protections against unreasonable searches. Massachusetts courts have interpreted those protections to require a high level of judicial scrutiny before investigators may obtain cellphone location information.
A key turning point came with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision in Commonwealth v. Perry. In that case, the court warned that broad requests for cellphone records—commonly known as "cell tower dumps"—can expose the location information of large numbers of innocent people who have no connection to a criminal investigation. Because geofence warrants raise many of the same concerns, the ruling reinforced strict limits on broad, location-based searches.
Today, Massachusetts investigators seeking location information must obtain a narrowly tailored search warrant approved by a judge. Rather than permitting broad requests for everyone who happened to be in a particular area, warrants must be specific and carefully limited to the needs of the investigation.
The state's safeguards extend beyond judicial approval. Warrants authorizing the collection of location information must also include procedures requiring law enforcement agencies to promptly and permanently delete data belonging to individuals who are not connected to the investigation, helping to minimize unnecessary retention of personal information.
The legal landscape has been further reshaped by changes within the technology industry. Google, whose Location History database once supplied much of the information used in geofence investigations nationwide, has shifted users' location histories to encrypted, on-device storage. As a result, the company generally no longer possesses a centralized database capable of supporting the broad geofence searches that were previously requested by law enforcement.
Taken together, Massachusetts' constitutional protections, strict judicial oversight, mandatory data-deletion requirements, and Google's revised data-storage practices have significantly reduced the availability and practical usefulness of reverse-location searches in criminal investigations.
