smartphones

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that access to historical cell-site records of a person’s location based on their mobile phone will require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before searching a person’s historical location records.

This is the first time the high court has ruled on whether a phone subscriber has a legitimate expectation of privacy regarding a telephone company’s records of their cellphone location data, according to Aloke Chakravarty, a partner in the Denver-based law firm of Snell & Wilmer.

“This is a landmark case for privacy, and how the court will deal with emerging technologies going forward,” Chakravarty said via email. “It creates a new lens through which to view a government’s ability to obtain third-party records where a criminal defendant neither possesses the records, doesn’t have a property interest in them, may not even know they exist, and he cannot personally even access them.”

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