The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement placing a GPS tracking device on a person amounts to a search, and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The unanimous decision March 30 returned a case to the North Carolina Supreme Court that had ruled that placing a GPS device on a person was not a search.
“It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Supreme Court ruled in the case of Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina.
Some of the justices argued the law turns on whether the government has trespassed on someone’s property. While other members argue that people have a reasonable expectation to the privacy of their location data.
The court decision helps make sense of how the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government interact with the law, according to a story in The Atlantic.
In the Grady case, Grady was a twice-convicted sex offender who challenged his order to wear a GPS monitor at all times.
