10
CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES
Opinion of the Court
[bank] employees in the ordinary course of business.” Id.,
at 442. The Court thus concluded that Miller had “take[n]
the risk, in revealing his affairs to another, that the information [would] be conveyed by that person to the Government.” Id., at 443.
Three years later, Smith applied the same principles in
the context of information conveyed to a telephone company. The Court ruled that the Government’s use of a pen
register—a device that recorded the outgoing phone numbers dialed on a landline telephone—was not a search.
Noting the pen register’s “limited capabilities,” the Court
“doubt[ed] that people in general entertain any actual
expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.” 442
U. S., at 742. Telephone subscribers know, after all, that
the numbers are used by the telephone company “for a
variety of legitimate business purposes,” including routing
calls. Id., at 743. And at any rate, the Court explained,
such an expectation “is not one that society is prepared to
recognize as reasonable.” Ibid. (internal quotation marks
omitted). When Smith placed a call, he “voluntarily conveyed” the dialed numbers to the phone company by “expos[ing] that information to its equipment in the ordinary
course of business.” Id., at 744 (internal quotation marks
omitted). Once again, we held that the defendant “assumed the risk” that the company’s records “would be
divulged to police.” Id., at 745.
III
The question we confront today is how to apply the
Fourth Amendment to a new phenomenon: the ability to
chronicle a person’s past movements through the record of
his cell phone signals. Such tracking partakes of many of
the qualities of the GPS monitoring we considered in
Jones. Much like GPS tracking of a vehicle, cell phone
location information is detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled.
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