Location Data Increasingly Shielded After High Court Ruling

It will keep getting harder for the government to take a suspect’s digital data without a warrant as federal and state courts expand U.S. constitutional privacy protections to newer technologies. That’s the word from privacy attorneys as the use of devices holding sensitive data proliferates.

Fleshing Out the Fourth: The Supreme Court’s latest foray into the subject, Carpenter v. United States, extended Fourth Amendment protections to historical cell tower location information. The high court didn’t rule on whether real-time data deserves the same protection, but several courts have since said that it does.

Information Overload: The decisions “reflect the ...