Who Owns Your Data?

Can police get your digital information and make you a suspect just because you happened to be in a location at a given time or happened to search for certain terms online? The U.S. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next week.

The court must decide whether cops can use what are known as “geofence warrants”—requests for information on every phone that was in the vicinity of a crime scene or every person who used a search engine to look up a certain topic on a certain date. Geofence warrants let law enforcement go on fishing expeditions, obtaining data on numerous people without presenting probable cause against any one of them specifically or naming a specific person or device to be searched.

That runs counter to the Fourth Amendment, Okello Chatrie’s lawyers argued in court in April. A broad swath of civil liberties groups agree.

The implications of this decision could go way beyond geofence warrants. At its core, this case is about who owns digital records like location history. Do you own your digital data? Or does it belong to the tech companies that store it?

It Starts With a Bank Robbery 

The case in question—Chatrie v. United States—was brought by Chatrie. He was convicted of bank robbery after police served Google with a geofence warrant, demanding that the company use its location history service records to find all devices that were within around 500 feet of the victimized bank within an hour of when the robbery took place.

That means the government sought information on an untold number of innocent people.

“After Google complied with that request, law enforcement sought and received additional location information for certain devices whose movements law enforcement deemed suspicious,” Chatrie’s petition to the Supreme Court noted. “Finally, without obtaining an additional search warrant, law enforcement requested and received names associated with three devices.”

This sort of thing is not rare: “Google received its first geofence warrant in 2016″ and “by 2021, geofence warrants constituted 25% of all warrants submitted to Google,” according to Chatrie’s petition.

The immediate question in this case is whether “geofence warrants” like the one used to nab Chatrie are constitutional. Chatrie’s lawyers argue that they are not—that their use violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires warrants to “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” based on probable cause. But lower courts have disagreed on the issue, making this a matter ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to tackle.

But It Doesn’t End With a Bank Robbery

More than a dozen civil liberties groups have formally weighed in, mainly suggesting that geofence warrants are clearly unconstitutional. “The Fourth Amendment was forged in opposition to general warrants—warrants that lacked probable cause, failed to particularly describe their targets, or left the scope of the search to the officer’s discretion,” noted the nonprofit legal group Institute for Justice in a brief submitted to the court. Geofence warrants subject “private location data (entrusted to tech companies) to blanket exploratory searches for criminal suspects in the same way that general warrants once subjected private papers (entrusted to publishers) to blanket exploratory searches for politically-libelous authors,” the Fourth Amendment rights group Restore the Fourth said in its brief.

Several groups suggested that this case concerns a bigger issue than whether or not geofence warrants in particular are legal. It comes down to the question of who owns your digital data—things like location history, text messages, search engine queries and AI chat logs, and much more.

If you own your own data, then authorities can’t just search it without a specific warrant naming you, no more than they could come into your home and search your desk at random or stop you on the street for no reason and rifle through your backpack. If you have a property right in your digital data, then it’s subject to the same protections as your tangible property is.

In Chatrie, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel majority held that because Chatrie chose to expose his location to Google, this didn’t count as a search that was required to conform to Fourth Amendment strictures. Rather, his location data falls under what is known as the third-party doctrine, which says people lose a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to information that they share with third parties, like phone companies or banks.

Google disagrees. It has argued that it’s just a custodian of your data, not the owner of it. Location history is like “a digital diary of locations that users ask Google to record and store,” it said in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court.

Property Rights in Data

People have a property right to their location data, argued the Cato Institute in its brief.  “Property rights lie at the heart of the Fourth Amendment, and they do not dissolve merely because one’s records are stored by a third party.”

“When contracts confer rights to control, exclude, copy, and delete digital records, they recognize an ownership interest,” noted Google. “It appears Google’s [terms of service] agreements vest those rights in users like Chatrie. If so, the government cannot seize, copy, or otherwise access such records without first obtaining a warrant.”

The Policing Project at New York University School of Law suggested something similar. Google users “possess core property rights in their Location History, including the right to use, enjoy, dispose, and exclude—and their contractual relationship with Google made clear that Google was just a bailee,” the group stated in a brief to the Court.

And X Corp made a similar point: “Terms of service that promise to protect the privacy of information shared by users with their service providers should be treated as the functional equivalent of ‘no trespassing’ signs on a possession perhaps more valuable than real property—our personal information.”

It’s possible that the court won’t touch any of these larger issues, weighing in only on whether the particular geofence warrants used in this case were reasonable or whether they count as a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes.

But some justices seemed aware of just how far beyond bank robberies this case goes. “What’s to prevent the government from using [geofence warrants] to find out the identities of everybody at a particular church, a particular political organization?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked during oral arguments.

Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested that if the government’s position in this case holds, then authorities who want “to determine everybody who is at a church, or a political rally, or the abortion clinic, or anything else like that” would be able to succeed.

That’s a deeply unsettling prospect—and one that the justices will hopefully reject.

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In the News

The end of Roe meant…more abortions? Data from the Society of Family Planning suggests there were nearly double the number of abortions in 2025 as there were in 2021.

This is largely due to a surge in people being remotely prescribed abortion pills—a phenomenon that started during the pandemic and surged as states started banning abortion in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs ruling.

“By December 2025, 29% of abortions were through telehealth,” notes KFF Health News:

Because the mailing of abortion pills has become so widespread in the post-Dobbs era, abortion opponents may simply be unable to stop it.

Massive legal battles are being waged by states with abortion bans, seeking to block the shipment of mifepristone across their borders.

The temporary pause in May was part of a lawsuit brought by Louisiana; the U.S. Supreme Court decided to restore telehealth access to mifepristone while a lower court hears the case.

And abortion opponents continue their push to get the Trump administration to crack down on the pills’ availability, either through a Food and Drug Administration safety review, or more drastic measures.

But many telehealth providers who help patients get abortions aren’t too worried.

Telehealth providers told KFF that even if mifepristone—part of a two-pill abortion medication regimen that also includes the drug misoprostol—is banned, they will continue to mail misoprostol, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating ulcers but is also commonly used in miscarriage management and abortion. “Other organizations are already directing patients to mifepristone from outside the U.S., through groups such as Aid Access and online pharmacies in places like India,” KFF reports.

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Read This Thread

Massive new “digital safety” bill moves forward. The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee has a new bipartisan plan to further regulate social media, online gaming, and more. The new bill—dubbed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act—includes elements of more than a dozen internet regulation bills, including the long-stalled (for good reason) Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

I haven’t had time to go through it all yet, but the Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston has a breakdown of some of its elements here:

When examining these proposals it is imperative to consider not only the impact on kids and teens but on how it impacts the default of the internet for all users and the resulting impacts on speech and privacy https://t.co/o4X3CSEiKC

— Jennifer Huddleston (@jrhuddles) June 23, 2026

Those who have gone through it don’t paint a very reassuring picture:

Weeks after America slammed the UK for dystopian social media rules, Congress is rushing through its own version.

The KIDS Act (with KOSA & more) is a bipartisan privacy nightmare: forces platforms to ID minors under a vague “should have known” standard, kills anonymity, ramps…

— Reclaim The Net (@ReclaimTheNetHQ) June 23, 2026

As Reclaim the Net points out, at least one particularly bad—and hotly contested—element didn’t make it into this final bill:

One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers.

The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

That language has drawn criticism from some Senate supporters who had pushed for stronger requirements. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA.”

Still, “the bill still creates a framework that pressures platforms to determine who their users are and how old they are,” notes Reclaim the Net:

The legislation defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known.” Similar language appears across multiple sections of the KIDS Act, including provisions covering online platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. That standard creates legal risk for companies that fail to identify minors, effectively encouraging them to gather more information about users to avoid liability.

The bill attempts to soften that implication by stating that “Nothing in this subtitle may be construed to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

But that reassurance rings hollow. Platforms are told they do not have to verify age, while simultaneously being held responsible if they “should have known” a user was a minor. The most obvious way to resolve that contradiction is to collect more data, deploy age-estimation technologies, or introduce identity checks across the board.

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More Sex & Tech

• Anthropic still can’t let people use Mythos 5 or Fable 5—the latest versions of its artificial intelligence system Claude—after the White House voiced concerns on June 12 about supposed security risks. According to Anthropic, it’s still not quite clear what the problem is. The White House seems to be making up its AI rules as it goes along, Wired suggests.

• The latest Gallup poll data finds 48 percent of those surveyed (of any age) think abortion should be legal in all (33 percent) or most (15 percent) circumstances.

• Texas is asking the U.S. Supreme Court “to leave in place an order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that allows the state to enforce a law that imposes age-verification and parental-consent requirements on minors’ access to apps and paid content within those apps,” notes SCOTUSBlog.

• “There are now more births to women over 40 than to teens — not the worst thing,” writes Andrew Stuttaford at National Review.

• It’s awesome to see Congressional staffers taking sex worker rights activists seriously (and the fact that The Washington Free Beacon is treating it like a joke is deeply annoying).

• The Freeman questions the concept of “smart cities.” The assumption “that the central problem of cities is primarily a lack of measurable information” is one that “misunderstands both cities and human beings,” Camolesi Modesto writes. “The most important forms of urban knowledge are often precisely those that cannot be centralized, quantified, or digitally processed.”

• Ahem:

Texas SB 2420 would require digital ID to access all apps.

Google and Apple do not allow pornographic apps in their app stores.

It’s not about pornography. https://t.co/CXLow2LTYK

— Patrick Hedger (@pat_hedger) June 23, 2026

The post Who Owns Your Data? appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/06/24/who-owns-your-data/