Welcome to 2026, where the Supreme Court is finally weighing in on the shocking, revolutionary, and totally-unforeseen discovery that the tracking beacon you voluntarily carry in your pocket actually… tracks you. In the case of *Chatrie v. United States*, the legal world is clutching its collective pearls over “geofence warrants.” The argument? That it’s a gross violation of privacy for police to see a digital breadcrumb trail leading directly to a bank robber because a few innocent bystanders’ data points might also be visible on the same map.

Let’s be real: the “proximity” argument is the ultimate participation trophy for privacy advocates. The claim that being “dragged into an investigation” by proximity is a new horror ignores the fact that if you’re standing at a crime scene while someone is getting shot, the police are probably going to ask you some questions. That’s not a “surveillance state”; that’s just how linear time and physical space work.

The core of the *Chatrie* case involves a 2019 bank robbery where the suspect, Okello Chatrie, was caught because his Google Location History—a feature he chose to turn on—refreshed every two minutes within three meters of the crime. The defense is acting like the police used a psychic medium to invade his soul, rather than just looking at the digital trail he shouted into the cloud. If you’re going to rob a bank in the 21st century, perhaps don’t bring a device that is essentially a high-precision GPS ankle monitor with a TikTok app installed.

The “privacy” argument here rests on a delightfully delusional assumption: that your location data is a secret. We live in an era where we trade our precise coordinates to a multinational corporation in exchange for a coupon for a 10% discount on a burrito, yet we expect the Fourth Amendment to act as a magical invisibility cloak the moment the flashing lights appear. You gave Google permission to know your location down to the three-meter mark so you could remember which Starbucks you visited three years ago; acting like that data is “private” now is like leaving your diary on a park bench and being offended when the park ranger reads it.

Critics of geofence warrants love to use the word “dragnet,” as if the FBI is rounding up thousands of innocent grandmas for questioning. In reality, these warrants are filtered by time and geography. If you happened to be within 100 yards of a bank robbery at 10:45 AM on a Tuesday, you’re already part of the investigation—the digital warrant just makes it so the police don’t have to knock on every door in the neighborhood to ask if they saw anything.

The assumption that this case is a “turning point” for digital rights is equally adorable. Even if SCOTUS decides that geofences are “unreasonable,” it won’t change the fact that your digital footprint is larger than a Sasquatch’s. We’ve spent fifteen years building a world where privacy is a secondary feature to convenience, and now we’re asking the highest court in the land to save us from our own “Accept Terms and Conditions” clicks.

So, as we wait for the 2026 ruling, let’s stop pretending that being “dragged” into a digital investigation is a surprise. If you don’t want to be a data point in a geofence, there’s a very simple, 19th-century solution: leave the tracking device at home while you’re out doing things you don’t want the government to know about. But then again, if you did that, how would you find your way home without Google Maps? Decisions, decisions.