For those of us who grew up before the age of computers and cell phones, a lot of what is currently happening in technology and being created electronically is very foreign. These changes in technology are also impacting our laws. Being tracked by your cell phone is nothing new. Back in the day when your cell phone looked like something you would use to call in an air strike, when you left one calling zone and entered another, you got a welcoming phone call. Even back then they knew where you were if you carried a cell phone (then known as a car phone).
On Wednesday, Just the News posted an article about how the location information on cell phones can be used.
The article reports:
Two federal appeals courts have taken starkly different views on one of the government ‘s newer electronic dragnet tools – geofence warrants that track people via their cell phones – setting up a likely showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court that could define privacy in the digital era for decades to come.
Last week, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that such geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment” protection against unlawful search and seizure. The judges concluded the mass gathering of Americans’ cell phone geographic locations to identify a single suspect in a postal worker’s armed robbery amounted to the sort of general warrant that the Founding Fathers steadfastly rejected at America’s birth as their new country broke from British rule.
“It is undeniable that general warrants are plainly unconstitutional,” that appeals court ruled. The 5th Circuit oversees appeals from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas federal district courts.
A few states over, the 4th U.S. Circuit of Appeals came to a different conclusion, ruling that when law enforcement gathers two hours of all a cell phone users’ records in Google’s database for a certain location near a crime it didn’t violate privacy because more than a half-billion cell phone users had opted to turn on the geo-tracking capabilities of their to make their apps work better. Such opt-ins, the 4th Circuit ruled, amounted to a waiver of privacy. The 4th Circuit oversees appeals from Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina federal district courts.
The article concludes:
In other words, using a digital dragnet to search millions of Americans location records to identify an unknown assailant or two amounted to a fishing exercise tantamount to the “general warrants” the Constitution’s framers rejected handily two centuries earlier.
Google has revealed that the number of geo-warrants has gone from rare in 2016 to overwhelming – more than 10,000 annually – a decade later. The tech giant announced last year it was shutting down its ability to store all users’ geo location data in its own database known as Sensorvault and instead leaving it on each consumer’s cell phone where it must be obtained by individual warrant.
No matter how Google changes their practices, the breadth of digital searching that law enforcement can still do in 2024 from other vendors leaves most experts certain the issue of geofencing and tactics likely will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
This is something to watch. How much privacy are Americans entitled to?
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