United States v. Jones
United States v. Antoine Jones
- Court
- Supreme Court of the United States (U.S. Supreme Court)
- Decided
- 2012
- Citation
- 565 U.S. 400 (2012)
- Standard applied
- Fourth Amendment — physical trespass plus information gathering
What the court held
Attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The Court affirmed the D.C. Circuit's reversal of a conviction that rested on twenty-eight days of warrantless GPS data.
Why
The majority rested on the physical intrusion: the government occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information, which would have been a trespassory search at the time the Amendment was adopted. Separate concurrences reasoned instead from expectations of privacy, with Justice Sotomayor and Justice Alito writing that prolonged aggregated location monitoring is itself the constitutional problem regardless of any trespass.
“We hold that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search.””
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Jones matters less for its trespass holding than for the five votes in concurrence that longer-term aggregated tracking invades a reasonable expectation of privacy — the reasoning Carpenter later adopted for records no one physically touched. For practitioners it is the origin point of the mosaic argument: that a sequence of individually unremarkable data points can become a search when assembled. The split rationale is also a useful reminder that the majority's theory does not reach purely digital collection.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: GPS tracking · mosaic theory · trespass
Cited 1,342times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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- United States v. WarshakCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit · 2010A subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of e-mails stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial internet service provider…
- In re Application of the United States for Historical Cell Site DataCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · 2013Court orders authorised by the Stored Communications Act compelling cell-phone service providers to produce subscribers' historical cell-site information are no…
- United States v. GrahamCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · 2016Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that a cell-phone user has no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information held by hi…
- United States v. DavisCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit · 2015Sitting en banc, the Eleventh Circuit held that a court order under § 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act compelling a telephone company to produce its bus…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.