United States v. Jones and the Future of Privacy Law: The Potential Far-Reaching Implications of the GPS Surveillance Case

BY DANIEL J. SOLOVE T he U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259 (U.S. Jan. 23, 2012) is a profound decision in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as well as in privacy law more generally. In this case, FBI agents installed a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device on Jones’s car and monitored where he drove for a month without a warrant. Antoine Jones challenged the warrantless GPS surveillance as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed (United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544 (D.C. Cir. 2010). Other federal circuit courts have reached conflicting conclusions on GPS, and the Supreme Court stepped in to resolve the conflict. In an astonishing set of opinions, the Court concluded 9-0 that the installation of a GPS tracking device on a car is a Fourth Amendment search. The opinions are quite surprising, not just because they take the law in new directions from the court’s existing precedent, but also because they advance some new theories of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that might reshape the way it is interpreted and have reverberations throughout a much broader swath of privacy law.