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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/GoesLIkeSchnell on 2026-07-09 22:08:20+00:00.
As a Richmond resident who remembers when the 2019 credit union robbery happened here, I’ve been following this case for a while, and since Linus, Luke, and Dan talked about geofence warrants on the WAN Show a few weeks ago, I figured this update was worth sharing.
Quick recap: after the robbery went cold, police served Google a geofence warrant demanding location data for every device near the bank around the time of the crime. That data eventually identified the suspect, but it also meant sweeping up data from a bunch of innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the area. The case (Chatrie v. United States) worked its way up to the Supreme Court.
On June 29th, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that accessing this kind of cell phone location data counts as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, meaning you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your location history, even though it’s stored by a third party like Google.
This doesn’t ban geofence warrants outright, but police now clearly need a proper warrant with probable cause to get this data.