A Google search or a phone’s location history can now put a name in a police file before a single detective ever knocks on a door. Keyword warrants and geofence warrants let law enforcement work backward from data to a suspect — and a landmark 2026 Supreme Court ruling just changed how far that reach can go.
What is a geofence warrant, and how is it different from a normal warrant?
A traditional search warrant starts with a suspect. Police develop probable cause to believe a specific person committed a specific crime, then ask a judge for permission to search a specific place or thing connected to that person. A geofence warrant runs the process in reverse. Police draw a virtual perimeter around the location and time window of a crime — a bank parking lot between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m., for example — and ask Google to identify every device that reported location history inside that box during that window. Google’s response typically comes in stages: first an anonymized list of device numbers, then a narrowed list after police pick out the “suspicious” movements, then names, addresses, and account information tied to the devices police want to keep.
A keyword warrant works the same way but with search terms instead of GPS coordinates. Instead of asking “who was here,” police ask Google “who searched for this.” If a fire was set at a particular address, police might ask Google to identify every account that searched the address in the days before the fire. Neither warrant identifies a suspect first. Also, neither one is limited to the guilty. Both ask a private company to sift through the data of everyone — the guilty, the innocent, and the merely curious — to generate a suspect list.
What did the Supreme Court just decide about geofence warrants?
On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court answered a question that had divided lower courts for years. In Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 (2026), the Court held 6-3 that law enforcement conducts a “search” under the Fourth Amendment when it accesses a person’s Google location history through a geofence warrant. Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, extended the reasoning of Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018) — the case that first held cell-site location records deserve constitutional protection — to Google’s Location History data, finding it shares the same sensitive, revealing character as historical cell-site records. The majority rejected the government’s argument that short-lived or narrowly-scoped location data falls outside constitutional protection, noting that even a brief slice of someone’s location history can reveal visits to places like medical clinics or attorneys’ offices.
The Court also declined to treat Google’s Location History as something a user voluntarily surrendered to a third party simply by leaving the setting turned on, since Google’s consent prompts don’t give most users a realistic sense of what they’re handing over. This is important because the government’s whole argument depended on the old “third-party doctrine” — the idea that once you share information with a company, you lose your expectation of privacy in it. The Court declined to extend that doctrine here.
Importantly, the ruling did not throw out geofence warrants altogether, and it did not resolve every open question. The Court sent Chatrie’s case back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the specific warrant used against him was supported by probable cause and described the place to be searched with enough particularity — the same two requirements every warrant has always needed. Left unresolved: exactly how the particularity requirement applies to each of the three stages of a geofence request (the initial device list, the narrowed list, and the final identification), and whether the “good-faith exception” can save evidence gathered under a defective geofence warrant issued before this ruling. Those fights will play out case by case for years.
Does this ruling apply in Florida, and what does Florida law already require?
Yes — and more directly than in most states. Florida’s own constitutional search-and-seizure provision, Article I, Section 12 of the Florida Constitution, contains a “forced linkage” clause: it must “be construed in conformity with the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court.” That means Florida courts don’t get to interpret their own search-and-seizure clause more narrowly than the Supreme Court interprets the Fourth Amendment. When the Supreme Court says accessing Google location data is a “search,” Florida courts are bound to follow that holding under the state constitution as well.
Florida also has statutes on the books that reflect the same underlying concern about law enforcement access to a person’s digital movements and communications, even though neither one was written with geofence warrants specifically in mind. Section 934.42, Florida Statutes, governs law enforcement’s use of “mobile tracking devices” — physical or electronic devices installed to follow a person’s movements — and requires an application showing the information sought is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation before a court will authorize the tracking. Notably, the statute expressly ties itself to evolving federal law: “the standards established by the United States Supreme Court for the installation and monitoring of mobile tracking devices shall apply.” Section 934.23, Florida Statutes — Florida’s version of the federal Stored Communications Act — separately requires a warrant before a provider like Google can be compelled to disclose the contents of an electronic communication that has been in storage 180 days or less. Neither statute is a perfect fit for a geofence or keyword warrant, but both were built to move in step with the Supreme Court’s evolving view of digital privacy, and Article I, Section 12 guarantees that Florida courts will read them that way. Chatrie is the next step in that evolution.
What about warrants that named a suspect only after Google turned over data on everyone else?
This is where the fight actually gets won or lost in individual cases. Even before Chatrie, courts recognized that a warrant has to satisfy two separate requirements: probable cause and particularity. Probable cause means the police affidavit has to show a fair probability that evidence of the crime will be found in the place searched — not just a hunch that “the person who did this probably used Google Maps to get there.” Particularity means the warrant has to describe, with real specificity, the place or things to be searched, not simply authorize a sweep of every device or every search query within a broad area or vague list of terms.
Geofence and keyword warrants have always sat uneasily with both requirements, because by design they don’t start with probable cause about a specific person — they generate the suspect after the fact by sorting through everyone’s data. Defense counsel challenging one of these warrants should scrutinize the affidavit for exactly what showing was made before each stage of the search. First, was there a real basis to believe the perpetrator’s own device would appear in the geofence, or search history would contain the target term, before Google’s data was ever pulled? Next, was the geographic area drawn tightly around where the crime actually occurred, or drawn broadly enough to sweep in an entire apartment complex, shopping center, or several city blocks? Finally, was the list of keywords narrow and tied to specific facts of the crime, or generic enough to catch anyone doing ordinary research? Chatrie gives Florida defense attorneys a controlling Supreme Court case to anchor these arguments, and it puts the burden back on the government to justify each stage of the process rather than treating Google’s compliance as a formality.
What should someone do if they learn they were identified through one of these warrants?
Being contacted, questioned, or arrested after a geofence or keyword warrant does not mean the case against a person is airtight — it often means the opposite. These warrants generate leads, not proof, and the underlying data can sweep up people who were nearby for reasons that have nothing to do with the crime under investigation. Anyone in this situation should stay silent beyond identifying information, decline to consent to further searches of a phone or accounts, and get a defense attorney involved immediately so the warrant itself — and everything Google turned over as a result of it — can be examined for the same probable cause and particularity problems the Supreme Court flagged in Chatrie. A defective warrant can lead to suppression of the location or search data under the exclusionary rule, and in some cases everything derived from it, under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.
- Fla. Stat. § 934.42 — Mobile tracking device authorization
- Fla. Stat. § 934.23 — Required disclosure of customer communications or records
- Article I, Section 12, Florida Constitution — Searches and seizures
- Search & Seizure Defense — the firm’s practice page on challenging unconstitutional searches
Legally reviewed by Tonmiel Rodriguez · Last reviewed July 2026
Tonmiel Rodriguez is Board Certified in Criminal Trial Law by The Florida Bar and represents clients across Polk, Highlands, Hardee, Osceola, and Hillsborough Counties whose cases began with a geofence warrant, a keyword warrant, or another form of digital surveillance. If law enforcement identified you through a Google data request and you have questions about what the warrant actually authorized, call (863) 774-4556 for a consultation.