The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide a critical cellphone privacy case

Why it matters to you

Our cellphones collect a veritable treasure trove of data on us, and now, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case on how that data can be used.

The highest court in the land will weigh in on whether or not the government must have a warrant in order to determine where you are based on your cellphone data. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Carpenter v. United States, a case which deals with historical data from cellphone companies that displays users’ movements, and could either implicate or exonerate users in a crime.

The current case concerns a man who has been convicted in a number of  armed robberies in Ohio and Michigan. His conviction, however, was secured with cellphone location data, and his lawyers say that without a warrant, access to this data constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Lower courts who have heard the case have ruled that the government does not, in fact, need a warrant to obtain this historical cellphone data, as such information was already willingly surrendered to a third party (the cellphone company).

But while this precedent has stood in years past, scrutiny of privacy rights, especially with the rise of connected devices like smartphones, has increased. And as such, it could be the case that the Supreme Court decides against lower court rulings.

“Because cellphone location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, who represents the suspect in the case, told Reuters. “The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the longstanding protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records,” Wessler added.

Regardless of what decision is ultimately handed down, it would likely have enormous implications for the future. As Steve Vladeck, a national security and constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, told Reuters, “Courts and commentators have tried to figure out exactly when individuals will have a continuing expectation of privacy even in data they’ve voluntarily shared with a third party. This case squarely raises that question.”