A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their cell phone location records. Cops don’t need a search warrant to get access to cell tower location records when investigating criminal cases because this information belongs to a third party, according to the ruling.
The case centered on Miami resident Quartavious Davis, who was convicted of robbery, possession of a firearm, and conspiracy in 2012 after investigators obtained 67 days of Davis’ cell phone records from MetroPCS—11,606 records in total. Davis was sentenced to 162 years in prison.
The case was appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on the grounds that Davis’ Fourth Amendment rights were violated. On Wednesday, the court ruled with a 9-2 vote that the “government’s obtaining of a court order for the product of MetroPCS business records did not violate the Fourth Amendment.” The ruling stated that even though the cell tower records concerned Davis, they did not belong to him because they were created by a third party. Therefore, Davis did not have a right to privacy around that information.
The ruling also argued that the public knows that cell towers are used to “connect calls, document charges, and assist in legitimate law-enforcement investigations.” Because the public is aware that they can be tracked through their cell phones, the ruling argues that people should have no reasonable right to expect privacy around those records. The ruling also compared cell phone location data to surveillance tapes in stores, saying that “those surveillance camera images show Davis’s location at the precise location of the robbery, which is far more than MetroPCS’s cell tower location records show.”
The two dissenting judges in the case critiqued the broad application of the "third-party doctrine" in the case, fearing that the government could have grounds to dramatically expand its searching capabilities without warrants in the future. Using the example of information
A few concurring judges also offered caution about the implications of the case. “This case is certainly about the present, but it is also potentially about the future,” Judge Jordan wrote. “I have some concerns about the government being able to conduct 24/7 electronic tracking (live or historical) in the years to come without an appropriate judicial order.”
Judge Rosembaum wrote that the dissenting judges were right to raise concerns. “In our time, unless a person is willing to live ‘off the grid,’ it is nearly impossible to avoid disclosing the most personal of information to third-party service providers on a constant basis, just to navigate daily life.” Rosembaum described the idea that the government could collect a wide range of third-party data without a warrant as “nothing less than chilling.”
Because of its implications in the evolving debate around privacy and technology in courts, this case has been followed closely by many civil liberty groups. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers all filed an Amicus Brief together in 2013, arguing that Davis’ Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
In a statement on Tuesday, ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler noted that other courts of appeal are grappling with the question of cell phone location tracking and that the issue will likely make it to the Supreme Court. "As the dissenting judges recognized, outdated legal doctrines from the analog age should not be mechanically extended to undermine our privacy rights in the voluminous digital records that come with modern life," he said.
