Chatrie v. United States · ¶1

On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Local police officers learned from witness interviews and surveillance footage that the robber had approached the credit union from a corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but they could not find out anything more, and the robber remained at large. On June 14, the police officers applied to a Virginia magistrate for a geofence warrant directed to Google, which would require Google to hand over data about the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union—the so-called “geofence”—near the time of the crime. The application described the cell-phone location data Google collects through a service called Location History, which records the location of a user’s cell phone every two minutes or so. The application also explained how that cell-phone location data could help…

slip opinion
Source edition
Passage preview. Read in context for the complete text, notes and references.