Court Rules Police Need a Warrant to Access Location Data From Your Cellphone

Source: Slate

Take a moment and try to remember where you were 24 hours ago. Maybe you’re a creature of habit and it’s easy to guess. Or maybe, like me, you can’t quite recall whether you were at work, at home, or somewhere in between. Either way, if you had your cellphone with you, it would be astonishingly easy for someone with the right access to pin your location down. Thanks to a recent court decision, however, that information just got a lot harder to examine for many in the United States.

In an order released Thursday by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge Lucy Koh found that Fourth Amendment protections extend to location data generated by cellphones. Ruling against the federal government, Koh affirmed that law enforcement agencies must seek a warrant before acquiring historical location data produced by a cellphone.

As Koh explains, modern phones constantly ping cellular towers, even when they’re not actively in use. Thanks to these regular connections, they generate a steady stream of data about their physical location—sometimes even when the user turns off location services, a fact that the ACLU stressed in an amicus brief. Koh notes that many users may be unaware of how much information they’re giving up as they move through the world. This data, which is known as cell site location information (or CSLI) can be important to legal investigations.

In the past, courts have largely avoided the issue of whether CSLI should be readily available. Koh writes, “Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Ninth Circuit has squarely addressed whether cell phone users possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in the CSLI, historical or otherwise, associated with their cell phones.”

Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/07/31/a_court_ruled_that_fourth_amendment_protections_extend_to_location_data.html