Related Content: Locational Privacy
With increasing frequency, law enforcement is using unconstitutional digital dragnet searches to attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases. In Commonwealth v. Dunkins, currently pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, EFF and the ACLU are challenging a new type of dragnet: law enforcement’s use of WiFi data...
Update May 17, 2021: Since this post was published, the court unsealed its July 24, 2020 opinion denying the government's application for a geofence warrant.Two federal magistrate judges in three separate opinions have ruled that a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements....
A Motherboard investigation revealed in January how any cellphone users’ real-time location could be obtained for $300. The pervasiveness of the practice, coupled with the extreme invasion of people’s privacy, is alarming.The reporting showed there is a vibrant market for location data generated by everyone’s cell phones—information that can...
The Supreme Court handed down a landmark opinion today in Carpenter v. United States, ruling 5-4 that the Fourth Amendment protects cell phone location information. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court recognized that location information, collected by cell providers like Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon, creates a...
Protecting the highly personal location data stored on or generated by digital devices is one of the 21st century’s most important privacy issues. In 2017, the Supreme Court finally took on the question of how law enforcement can get ahold of this sensitive information.Whenever you use a cell phone, whether...
Federal courts must end the excessive secrecy surrounding law enforcement surveillance orders, a U.S. Senator urged in a letter on Friday. This secrecy block’s the public’s ability to fully understand how police conduct this surveillance, the lawmaker wrote.
The letter, sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Or), asks federal...
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the U.S. Supreme Court to review a troubling ruling that allows police to obtain—without a warrant—location data from people’s cell phones to track them in real time.EFF, joined by the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Constitution Project,...
