Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement must obtain a warrant to get your cellphone location data.
It's a landmark ruling for privacy.
Alfred, you covered it from the start.
I mean, what does this mean for everyone?
I mean, essentially, the big change here is that law enforcement can't, Like just obtained your cell phone historical records without a warrant anymore.
Which is what they were doing.
Yeah, in the past they were able to do that because they used this thing called the third party doctrine.
The idea that that data, that belongs to the third party.
So in this case with Timothy Carpenter They pulled up all his historically GPS data from his phone basically saying we're not taking it from him, we're taking it from his cell phone service provider.>> So like a Verizon or AT&T?>> Yeah yeah.
And that data belongs to them.
That you know rule kind of came with credit card information as well in the past where The idea of, we're using, we're getting this data of your credit card transactions from, like the credit card company, not from you.>>Right.>>That data doesn't belong to you.
But this ruling basically says like, no that That data on a cell phone because you're using a cell phone everywhere you have an expectation of privacy.
That thing follows you everywhere.
So, that is considered a fourth amendment search and you do need a warrant for this
What does this mean for law enforcement?
I think this is For individuals, a positive in terms of privacy, but what about for law enforcement and their ability to combat crime?
I mean, essentially this adds an extra step for them for when they want to conduct their investigations, but it could extend to more than just your cell phone records.
Because in the Chief Justice John Roberts opinion, he had written basically that
The big reason for this is because you can't really opt out of having a cell phone.
The defense that they were using, credit cards, you can use cash to buy things, so that's different.
But you have an option to get out of that.
The way that technology has evolved, though, there's so many things that you need the tech for that this counts as an invasion of privacy.
So, you could extend in the future if everything in a smart home is ubiquitous, it's all over your house and you can't really do normal things without a smart home anymore, then that would fall under it and things like that.
Well, there was already an example of that where law enforcement tried to get Amazon Echo information in a murder case.
Yeah, right.
So, we're already seeing some elements of that already.