A geofence warrant is a court order that requires a technology company to turn over location data for every device that was inside a defined geographic area during a specific window of time. Instead of naming a suspect and asking for that person’s records, the warrant starts at a crime scene and works backward to see who was nearby. Law enforcement leaned on these warrants heavily when they had no suspect, but the ground is shifting fast: Google has restructured its location data so it can no longer answer most of these requests, federal appeals courts are split on whether the warrants are constitutional at all, and the Supreme Court has agreed to decide the question.
How a Geofence Warrant Actually Works
The process runs in three steps, and courts have scrutinized every stage.
First, law enforcement serves the warrant on a tech company, historically almost always Google, with a geographic boundary and a time range. The company returns anonymized data for every device that appeared inside those boundaries during that window: anonymous device identifiers, latitude and longitude, timestamps, and the source of the location fix such as GPS, Wi-Fi, or a cell tower. No names at this stage.1United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States of America v. Jamarr Smith, Thomas Iroko Ayodele, Gilbert McThunel II
Second, investigators sift the anonymous list. They drop devices that clearly have nothing to do with the crime and sometimes ask for extended location history on a smaller subset to see where those devices went before and after the window. A phone that lingered twenty minutes looks very different from one that passed by once.
Third, for the devices still of interest, law enforcement requests identifying information: usually the account holder’s name, email, and phone number. This unmasking can happen through the original warrant or a separate order. A persistent criticism is that investigators, not a judge, often decide which devices get de-anonymized.1United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States of America v. Jamarr Smith, Thomas Iroko Ayodele, Gilbert McThunel II
Why Google and Why That Is Changing
Geofence warrants grew up around Google because of how its Location History feature worked. When users opted in, Google stored detailed location records on its own servers in a centralized system sometimes called “Sensorvault.” That design made it technically possible for Google to search its records by geography and time, which is exactly what a geofence warrant demands. Requests climbed sharply starting in 2018.2Google. Supplemental Information on Geofence Warrants in the United States
Other companies have received requests too, including Apple, Uber, and Lyft, but Google was reportedly the only one known to regularly comply. Apple’s position is simple: it does not have the data, because it does not store users’ location history on its servers in a format it can search.3Apple. Transparency Report: Government and Private Party Requests January 1 – June 30, 2024
In December 2023, Google announced it was moving Location History off its servers and onto individual users’ devices, with end-to-end encryption for any cloud backups. Under that design, Google itself cannot access or search users’ location records and cannot respond to geofence warrants even if it wanted to. The practical result: the single largest source of geofence data has effectively closed. Some observers have noted that investigators may turn to smaller data brokers or commercial location-data vendors operating with less oversight, but those relationships are far less established and carry their own legal problems.
The Fourth Amendment Problem
The Fourth Amendment protects people against unreasonable government searches and requires that warrants be supported by probable cause and describe with specificity what will be searched and seized.4Library of Congress. U.S. Constitution – Fourth Amendment A judge has to review the application and find enough evidence to believe a crime occurred and that the warrant will turn up relevant evidence.
Geofence warrants sit awkwardly inside those requirements. A standard warrant names a specific person or place where evidence is expected. A geofence warrant sweeps up data from everyone in an area, most of whom have no connection to any crime. The hard question is whether the government can have probable cause to search everyone in a neighborhood just because something happened there.
The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States set the stage. The Court held that the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it obtains historical cell-site location records, and that doing so requires a warrant supported by probable cause. The Court described detailed location tracking as an “intimate window into a person’s life” and recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of a person’s physical movements.5Supreme Court of the United States. Carpenter v. United States Carpenter involved a known suspect, not a dragnet, but its reasoning has become the backbone of arguments that geofence warrants cannot survive constitutional scrutiny.
Courts evaluating these warrants pay close attention to how tightly the area and time window are drawn. A small parking lot for fifteen minutes in the middle of the night captures far fewer innocent people than a dense city block during the afternoon. Warrants have been found overbroad when they encompassed residential homes of uninvolved people or ran long enough to sweep in large numbers of passersby. The location data itself is also imprecise: GPS coordinates provided by tech companies are often accurate only to within roughly 20 meters, so a device can appear inside a geofence when the person was actually across the street.
Where the Courts Stand Now
In August 2024, the Fifth Circuit held that geofence warrants are “modern-day general warrants” prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, finding they lack both probable cause and particularity because they search the location data of every person in an area without individualized suspicion. The court still allowed the evidence in that case under the good-faith exception, which lets evidence stand when officers reasonably believed they were acting lawfully at the time.1United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States of America v. Jamarr Smith, Thomas Iroko Ayodele, Gilbert McThunel II
The Fourth Circuit took up the same question in United States v. Chatrie. After a panel decision in July 2024, the full court reheard the case en banc and issued its decision in April 2025, affirming the lower court.6United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. United States v. Chatrie – On Rehearing En Banc The split between the circuits has pushed the issue up, and the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Chatrie.7Supreme Court of the United States. Chatrie v. United States of America A ruling will set a nationwide standard on whether geofence warrants can satisfy the Fourth Amendment at all.
If Your Data Was Swept Up
The most troubling feature of these warrants is how easily they pull in people who have done nothing wrong. Because the warrant captures every device in an area, anyone nearby becomes a data point in a criminal investigation.
Zachary McCoy, a cyclist in Florida, got swept into a burglary investigation because his daily ride took him past a burglarized home three times within an hour on the day of the crime. He had no involvement. Jorge Molina, in Arizona, was jailed for six days on suspicion of murder after a geofence warrant flagged a phone tied to his Google account near the scene. His stepfather, later arrested for the killing, had been using one of Molina’s old phones that was still signed into his accounts. Molina lost his job, failed subsequent background checks, and had his car seized during the investigation.1United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States of America v. Jamarr Smith, Thomas Iroko Ayodele, Gilbert McThunel II
If a geofence warrant has produced evidence in a case against you, the main tool for fighting it is a motion to suppress. The two arguments that have landed hardest in court are overbreadth and lack of particularity. Overbreadth attacks the size of the area or the length of the time window, especially when the geofence included residences or dense public spaces where hundreds of uninvolved people would inevitably be captured. Particularity attacks the warrant’s failure to specify what will be seized and who decides: the company picks which devices fall inside the boundary in Step One, and investigators often pick whose identity to unmask in Step Three, delegating decisions that should sit with a judge.
Even a successful constitutional argument does not always get the evidence thrown out. The good-faith exception can save evidence obtained by officers who reasonably relied on a warrant that looked valid at the time, which is what happened in the Fifth Circuit case. That argument gets harder for the government to make as more appellate courts flag the problems. Officers cannot easily claim ignorance of a constitutional defect once multiple circuits have called it out.
State Legislation
Some state legislatures have introduced bills to restrict or ban geofence warrants outright. These proposals generally prohibit any government entity from seeking a court order that would identify people based solely on their presence in a geographic area during a time window, and several also block law enforcement from going through federal agencies or out-of-state partners to obtain the same data indirectly. As of early 2026 the movement is still developing, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Chatrie could either speed it up or reshape it depending on how broadly the Court rules.