Your location history is like a fingerprint. And cops can get it without a warrant.

Does it violate your privacy rights for the government to track the minute-by-minute movements of your cellphone? A federal appeals court said no. And that’s a bigger deal than you might think.

Information about where your phone has been might seem innocuous, but it can be surprisingly revealing. Location data can identify where someone sleeps, where they work, who they get a beer with, what medical professionals they visit and what political or religious gatherings they attend. And it’s almost impossible to anonymize this data because, as Jeff Jonas, IBM fellow and chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics Group has argued, people are “living in habitrails,” following a standardized schedule in which work and home markers are easy to discern. In fact, Jonas points out that because no one is exactly where you are at exactly the same time, your location records qualify as a behavioral biometric marker, as distinctive as a fingerprint.