Gov't Location Data Purchases Spark Privacy Alarms
A high-engagement social media discussion is raising alarms about the U.S. government bypassing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing citizens' location data from brokers without a warrant. Meanwhile, press freedom advocates are warning that the Supreme Court could soon greenlight 'geofence warrants,' which threaten to expose journalists' sources and movements.
The practice of government agencies buying citizens' location data is a direct response to the Supreme Court's 2018 *Carpenter v. United States* decision, which requires a warrant to obtain such information from cell phone providers. Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the IRS, almost immediately began purchasing similar data from commercial data brokers to bypass this constitutional requirement. Data brokers acquire location information by paying mobile app developers for access to their users' data, often through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in apps or by harvesting it from the advertising bidstream process. One broker, Venntel, told the DHS it collects over 15 billion location points from more than 250 million devices every day, which it then sells to government clients for uses like immigration enforcement. On the legislative front, the House of Representatives passed "The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act" in April 2024, which would require the government to get a court order to obtain data from brokers. The bill, however, has previously failed in the Senate and its future remains uncertain. The debate over geofence warrants, which compel companies like Google to turn over data on all devices in a specific area, has also escalated. The number of these warrants received by Google surged from 982 in 2018 to 11,554 in 2020, making up over a quarter of all U.S. warrants the company received that year. Federal appeals courts have issued conflicting rulings on whether these warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. Proponents argue users consent to location tracking by opting into services, while opponents contend these "digital dragnet" searches are equivalent to the general warrants forbidden by the Constitution because they sweep up data on many innocent people. The Supreme Court agreed on January 16, 2026, to resolve this conflict by hearing the case of *Chatrie v. United States*. The case stems from a 2019 robbery investigation where a geofence warrant was used to identify a suspect from Google's location data repository. Press freedom organizations argue that geofence warrants pose a unique threat to journalism. A single warrant targeting a newsroom or a protest location could identify journalists, their confidential sources, and other individuals present, regardless of any connection to criminal activity.
