Police vs privacy: US SC looks at cell phone tracking

Debate over cops having right to obtain location data of a person’s phone

A cell phone can be pinged in your bedroom. It can ping you in the most intimate details of your life, presumably even in a dressing room as you're undressing. — Sonia Sotomayor US Supreme Court Justice

Washington, Nov. 30: Where do we go? Who do we talk to? What do we read about? Our mobile phones are troves of personal, private information, and the US Supreme Court weighed on Wednesday how easily police should be able to get it.

In a case seen as a landmark for privacy protection in the digital age, the court heard arguments over whether, police have the right to obtain the location data of a person’s phone from providers without a search warrant.

During the hearing, most of the high court’s nine justices appeared deeply concerned about how phone companies can track a person’s movements via their device and hand that information, sometimes years, to asked.

Civil libertarians that information is by the Constitution.

But law enforcement officials say the location data transmitted from a phone to a cell tower has been

●

essentially made public and handed over to a third party, giving up any claim the owner might have to privacy.

The specific case involves Timothy Carpenter, who was tracked down and convicted of theft in 2011 after the police obtained some 12,898 cell tower location points for Carpenter’s device over four months from phone companies.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared to agree with the pro- privacy advocates. The cell phone “is an appendage now for some people,” she noted.

“Right now we’re only talking about the cell site records, but as I understand it, a cell phone can be pinged in your bedroom. It can be pinged at your doctor’s office. It can ping you in the most intimate details of your life — presumably at some point even in a dressing room as you’re undressing.”

The US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantees the privacy of citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and says police must obtain warrants based on “probable cause” if they want to search a suspect’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

Parties on both sides of the case agree that the law did not anticipate an era in which everyone relies on a cell phone and technology providers can amass data on a person via those phones.

Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union representing Carpenter, said the police collection of the phone location data constituted a “search” that required a warrant.

“The concern here is with the privacy invasion, which is quite severe over the long term, over these more than four months of data,” he told the court.

— AFP

Law enforcement officials say the location data transmitted from a phone to a cell tower has been made public and handed over to a third party, giving up any claim the owner might have to privacy