The Supreme Court has said that law enforcement must first seek a warrant before obtaining historical cell phone location records from phone companies, upending a near-decade long practice by police.
The court ruled 5-4 on the case, in what became one of the most awaited privacy legal decisions in the US this year.
The so-called “Carpenter” case had centered on the eponymous Timothy Carpenter, a criminal who was caught thanks to cell phone records in 2011. Law enforcement had obtained his location data from a phone provider without a search warrant, arguing the provider already had his data and Carpenter had no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
