SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON CELLPHONE PRIVACY
Personal data collected from towers is at stake
Protections “apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records.” Nathan Freed Wessler, American Civil Liberties Union
Your cellphone service provider knows where you’ve been. Now the Supreme Court will decide if it’s OK for police to find out as well — without a warrant.
The justices agreed Monday to hear what will be the latest in a string of cases testing the clash of technology and privacy.
The challenge comes from a man convicted of armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio, for whom police accessed 127 days of cellphone records, revealing 12,898 points of location data. The suspect, Timothy Carpenter, was convicted and then lost a 2-1 federal appeals court ruling in which he argued that police should have sought a warrant.
“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,” said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Nathan Freed Wessler. “The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the long- standing protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records.”
Police conducting criminal investigations routinely get court orders to obtain records from cellphone service providers showing where suspects have traveled, based on which cell towers they used.
Federal appeals courts have agreed in recent years that the data is not protected under the Fourth Amendment because customers already provide the information to the companies.
The high court has shown a keen interest in privacy rights when it comes to modern technology. In 2014, the justices ruled unanimously that police usually need a search warrant to prowl through a smartphone’s contents. In 2012, they ruled that police cannot track suspects by placing GPS tracking devices on their vehicles. In prior decades, the court also ruled that warrants are required to use devices ranging from an electronic beeper to a thermal imaging device in order to gain private information.
But when it comes to cellphone location data, lower courts generally have cited a Supreme Court case from 1979 that held there is no right to privacy when information has been voluntarily turned over to a third party. In that case, it was the phone numbers dialed from a private home. In the current case, it’s the location data automatically collected from cell towers.
The federal government contends that customers’ approximate locations enable police to link them to the time and place of crimes under investigation, but without the information that would come from details contained inside peoples’ cellphones.
“Petitioner lacks any subjective expectation of privacy in phonecompany records of historical cell-site data because they are business records that MetroPCS and Sprint create for their own purposes,” the Justice Department argued in court papers.