No One Will Save You From Cellphone Tracking

Nearly everywhere your cellphone goes in the world, it is tracked. When you start or end a call, your cell provider logs a piece of data saying where your phone is in the world. When you send or receive a text, it logs the same kind of data. And every time you get a notification, it logs similar data again. Of course this kind of tracking doesn’t just follow your cellphone. If you’re carrying your phone while it does all these things, then you are tracked, too. This location data—officially called “cell-site location information,” or CSLI—has been the topic of legal controversy lately. Because your cell provider ultimately creates this information, it is subject to the “third-party doctrine,” a piece of legal precedent created by the Supreme Court in the 1970s. The third-party doctrine allows for the government to access information shared with a third party (like a bank or a phone company) without a warrant. In other words, a police department or law enforcement agency can back-request historical CSLI whenever they want—and they don’t need a warrant to do so. This ease of access makes CSLI one of the most common forms of government surveillance: In 2015, AT&T alone received almost 60,000 requests for historical CSLI. (In order to track a cellphone in real time, police still need a warrant.)

The relative ease of this method strikes many privacy advocates as, well, inappropriate. After all, the Supreme Court ruled just a few years ago that attaching a GPS tracker to someone’s car requires a warrant—shouldn’t cellphones, which nearly everyone carries around already, be subject to the same protections? For the past few years, two of the country’s most prominent privacy advocacy groups—the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union—have encouraged the nation’s highest court to take up the CSLI issue. On top of everything else, it seems like a perfect cudgel to update the law around the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. And it may well be—but it probably won’t happen in 2016.