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SCOTUS: government needs warrant to search cell tower records


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19 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I am sure telecom providers would be willing to sell the data to federal agencies if a warrant was too problematic to acquire.  They probably already sell the data to travel and credit card companies. 

 

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-will-stop-selling-your-phones-location-to-data-brokers/

 

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47 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I am sure telecom providers would be willing to sell the data to federal agencies if a warrant was too problematic to acquire.  They probably already sell the data to travel and credit card companies. 

IANAL, but my understanding is that if a cell phone provider gives this data away without a warrant, it then can't be used in court. For location data gathered from cell phone towers, you would need to convince a judge and get a warrant in order to use that info. Someone please correct me if that's not the case.

 

What is less clear after this ruling is exactly how broad it is. The court went out of their way to specify that this is a narrow ruling, but they also seem to limit it to location data, which itself is rather broad.

 

So this ruling might be very specific to only data scraped from cell towers, or it could mean a warrant is required for any kind of persistent location tracking, regardless of the third party doctrine.

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