Larry E. Holtz, Esq.
Geofence Warrants
Unlike warrants for surveilling known suspects, geofencing lets police gather data around a crime location when the suspects’ identities are unknown.
Geofence warrants let police request location data for all devices within a defined area and time to identify unknown suspects or witnesses. Courts are divided on their legality – some finding them too broad and unconstitutional “general warrants,” while others uphold narrowly drawn geofence warrants which specify exact coordinates, times and limits to protect privacy.
“In requesting a geofence warrant, law enforcement simply specifies a location and period of time and, after judicial approval, companies conduct sweeping searches of their location databases and provide a list of cell phones and affiliated users found at or near a specific geographic area (the “geofence”) during a specific timeframe, both defined by law enforcement.” United States v. Smith, 110 F.4th 817, 822 (5th Cir. 2024). See also Price v. Clifton (D.Cal. 2024) (describing a “geofence warrant” as a “reverse-location” warrant which “draws a virtual geographic fence around the location of the crime, on the date of the crime and for a specific, limited time period encompassing the crime”).
When seeking such warrants, the government typically goes through a three-step process. At step one, it obtains a warrant for anonymized information about various accounts or users which match certain criteria – e.g., that they were in a particular location (within the “geofence”) within a given timeframe.
To do this, Google must search all Location History data to identify users, regardless of whether the users saved Location History data. After narrowing the list to users who had their Location History enabled, Google also provides the date and time, the latitude and longitude, the geolocation source used, and the map display radius (i.e., the confidence interval) for the relevant accounts. See United States v. Smith, 110 F.4th 817, 824-25 (5th Cir. 2025); United States v. Chatrie, 146 F.4th 100, 103 (4th Cir. 2025).
At the second step, law enforcement may “compel Google to provide additional location coordinates beyond the time and geographic scope of the original request,” ostensibly to “assist … in eliminating devices.” United States v. Chatrie, 590 F.Supp.3d 901, 916 (E.D. Va. 2022), aff’d., 136 F.4th 100 (4th Cir. 2025) (en banc). But, while law enforcement may widen the geographic scope of the request, Google “typically require[s] law enforcement to narrow the number of users for which it requests [additional] data.” Id.
Finally, at the third step, law enforcement, through a second warrant or court order, can compel Google to provide account identifying information for the users the government determines are relevant to the investigation. This account identifying information includes the name and E-mail address associated with an account.
Google received its first geofence warrant request in 2016. Since then, requests for geofence warrants have skyrocketed in number. From 2017 to 2018 alone, requests to Google for geofence warrants increased over 1,500%. “In 2019, Google was receiving about 180 geofence warrant requests per week from law enforcement around the country, amounting to about 9,000 geofence requests for that year. … By 2020, that number went up to 11,500 geofence warrant requests. … By 2021, geofence warrants comprised more than 25% of all warrant requests Google received in the United States.” Smith at 821-22.
So far, Google has been the primary recipient of geofence warrants, in large part due to its extensive Location History database, known as the “Sensorvault.” Companies such as Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, and Uber have all received geofence warrant requests, but Google is the most common recipient and the only one known to respond.
In a significant move which has sparked debates on privacy and law enforcement, Google has recently announced that it will change company access to users’ location history, meaning it will no longer respond to police “geofence warrants.” See Joanna Putman, https://tinyurl.com/2zw5wxm8. But see Google LLC v. United States, ___ F.Supp. ___ (D.D.C. 2025) (compelling Google to provide the step two information requested).
In United States v. Smith, 110 F.4th 817, 820 (5th Cir. 2024), law enforcement officials were investigating a robbery of a contract route carrier with the United States Postal Service. The assailant (defendant) approached the carrier while he was in his truck, sprayed him with pepper spray, struck him multiple times with a handgun, threatened to kill him, and grabbed the registered mailbags from his truck which contained $60,706. Thereafter, the assailant fled and the carrier drove his truck to the front of the post office and called 911.
Nine months after the robbery, the Postal Inspection Service had not been able to identify any suspects in their investigation. In light of this difficulty, the officials decided to try the use of a geofence warrant in an attempt to identify who might have been present at the scene of the robbery. They therefore applied for a geofence warrant seeking information from Google to locate potential suspects and witnesses in connection to the robbery.
In this appeal, the Fifth Circuit held that the use of geofence warrants is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
Preliminarily, the court held that geofencing is a search under the Fourth Amendment, particularly here where the law enforcement officials sought location history data from Google. Given the intrusiveness and ubiquity of such data, the defendants “correctly contend that they have a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ in their respective data.” Id. at 836.
“Having concluded that the acquisition of location history data via a geofence is a search, it follows that the government must generally obtain a warrant supported by probable cause and particularity before requesting such information.” Id. Said the court:
When law enforcement submits a geofence warrant to Google, Step One forces the company to search through its entire database to provide a new dataset which is derived from its entire Sensorvault. In other words, law enforcement cannot obtain its requested location data unless Google searches through the entirety of its Sensorvault – all 592 million individual accounts – for all of their locations at a given point in time. Moreover, this search is occurring while law enforcement officials have no idea who they are looking for or whether the search will even turn up a result. Indeed, the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search. That is constitutionally insufficient.
Geofence warrants present the exact sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
While the results of a geofence warrant may be narrowly tailored, the search itself is not. A general warrant cannot be saved simply by arguing that, after the search has been performed, the information received was narrowly tailored to the crime being investigated. These geofence warrants fail at Step One; they allow law enforcement to rummage through troves of location data from hundreds of millions of Google users without any description of the particular suspect or suspects to be found.
Accordingly, we hold that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 837-38.
(Compare In re Search Warrant Application for Geofence Location Data Stored at Google Concerning an Arson Investigation, 497 F. Supp.3d 345, 349 N.D. Ill. 2020) (finding that the government’s “application for location data within six geofence areas relating to an arson investigation satisfied the probable cause and particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment”); Price v. Superior Court, 93 Cal.App.5th 13, 310 Cal. Rptr.3d 520 (2023) (finding that the Fourth Amendment did not require suppression of evidence from a geofence warrant in a first-degree murder case in part because the warrant was a model of particularity, seeking location data for a 22 minute period, from the front yard of the house where the shooting occurred and from the street in front of the house, for the length of two houses in each direction, where the two suspects were seen fleeing after the shooting).
In Texas, the Court of Criminal Appeals has ruled that a geofence warrant was sufficiently “narrowly drawn” so as to not violate the Fourth Amendment. In Wells v. State (Tex. Crim. App. 2025), four suspects committed a home invasion robbery during which Nikita Dickerson was shot and Jimmy Giddings was murdered. The detective investigating the case applied for a geofence warrant and received information in response to the warrant. A suspect was identified and charged with capital murder. Both the trial court and the intermediate appellate court ruled that the geofence warrant was “as narrowly tailored as possible to capture only location data for suspects and potential witnesses.” Said the court:
The warrant…identified the specific latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, narrowly drawn to include no more than a part of the church, the appurtenant church grounds where the assailants waited, the street they rushed across, the front yard of the house where Dickerson was shot, and the house itself, in which Giddings was killed. It also gave a specific date – the date of the murder – as well as the 25 minute window of time during which the offense took place. This degree of specificity appropriately circumscribed police discretion, limiting the information they could obtain from the location history database to that which was relevant to identifying whoever was present at the specific time and place of the offense itself.
Moreover, the “Initial Search Parameters” were sufficiently tailored in terms of time and place as to minimize the potential for infringing on the privacy rights of persons who could not reasonably be regarded as either suspects or witnesses to the offense. The area to be searched was small and restricted to the places where police knew that the unidentified suspects were located: a part of the church grounds, where the suspects hid in waiting for Giddings to arrive home; the street between the church and the home which the suspects rushed across; and the front yard and interior of the house itself, where the assaults on Dickerson and Giddings took place. These were not high traffic areas – especially not during the brief period of time in the middle of the night when the offense occurred. It was not at all likely that the geofence in this case would have identified many innocent bystanders or passersby who would not have been relevant to the investigation.
Accordingly, the Wells court held that the warrant was supported by probable cause and satisfied the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment.
A similar result was reached in Jones v. State, 321 Ga. 137, 913 S.E.2d 700 (2025), where the defendant (Jones) was charged with murder after the police identified her using the location history from her cell phone. The location history was obtained through “search warrants that authorized the police to obtain from Google an anonymized list of devices that reported their locations within 100 meters of the victim’s home during the four hours when the murder happened – a process known as ‘geofencing’ – and identifying information tied to the subset of devices that were relevant to the investigation. Before trial, Jones moved to suppress the evidence from the geofence warrants, arguing that the warrants violated the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution because they were not supported by probable cause and failed to satisfy that Amendment’s particularity requirement. The trial court denied the motion[.]”
On appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed, holding:
“The warrant applications explained among other things that the suspect was caught on video using a cell phone near the victim’s home; that many cell phones generate Google location history data; and, later, that the movements of a specific cell phone ‘matched up’ with what was known of the suspect’s movements. That information, together with the reasonable inferences and common sense that a reviewing magistrate may draw on in assessing probable cause, gave the magistrate here a substantial basis for concluding that accessing the location history and identifying information sought from Google had a fair probability of helping the police identify the unknown murder suspect in the video. And the warrants satisfied the particularity requirement because they gave the police specific guidance as to what information they were authorized to access – a list of anonymized Google IDs and location history data from devices reporting their locations within 100 meters of the victim’s home during a given time frame, and then identifying information tied to one of those Google IDs – and avoided the kind of unfettered discretion that would pose a particularity problem.”
Larry E. Holtz has served as a Detective Sergeant with the Atlantic City, New Jersey, Police Department; a Deputy Attorney General for the state of New Jersey, and an Assistant County Prosecutor. Presently, Mr. Holtz is a leading author for Blue360° Media, the largest US provider of legal information which is solely focused on serving law enforcement. Mr. Holtz is a certified police trainer and teaches on a regular basis. He is a member of the bar in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia and is admitted to practice before the federal bar in the District of New Jersey and the Third Circuit.