Privacy rights campaigners are celebrating a major victory after the Supreme Court ruled that the US government must seek a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data on individuals. The 5-4 ruling grants Fourth Amendment protection to what it described as “deeply revealing” data which can be used to create a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years.” “As the Court noted, not only does access to this kind of information allow the government to achieve ‘near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,’ but, because phone companies collect it for every device, the ‘police need not even know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when’,” said EFF attorneys Andrew Crocker and Jennifer Lynch.

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