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 Thursday 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 going back years, to police when asked. Civil libertarians say that information is protected by the US 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 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 his device over four months from phone companies.
