Federal Appeals Court Upholds Warrantless Cellphone Tracking
A federal appeals court said that government authorities could extract historical location data directly from telecommunications carriers without a search warrant, The New York Times reports.
The case is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers, the article says. The court ruled that a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.