Privacy on the Map (Part 2): Progress, Pitfalls, and the Fight for Enforceable Location Data Protections

Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look like, outlining the baseline standards states should meet to shield individuals from pervasive location surveillance. Since then, state lawmakers across the country have begun responding to calls like these, with Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia enacting new consumer privacy restraints on an industry that profits off our physical movements.

Yet, even as these states move the ball forward to restrict location tracking, most of their laws leave significant gaps that still must be filled. Other states – and Congress – need to get into the game, too, and ensure protection of everyone.

Why Location Privacy Is Important

Imagine spending a couple of hours in a coffee shop, a friend's house, or a healthcare clinic, only to discover yourself under police investigation because your cell phone’s location data exposed your presence there.

This is the reality of geofence warrants for location data, the controversial surveillance technique recently scrutinized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States. Through geofencing, tech companies and law enforcement can map everyone who was present within a specific area over a certain window of time, inverting standard constitutional protections by turning every innocent bystander into a potential suspect. While the Supreme Court's ruling in Chatrie established that accessing location data via geofencing constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring constitutional protections, law enforcement demands via these warrants are only part of the problem. That same geolocation tracking is used by commercial data brokers operating in a largely unregulated market. These brokers regularly harvest, aggregate, and sell physical location data to anyone with a credit card (including government agencies, which are among their regular clients). Especially for individuals seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, attending a protest, or visiting an immigration law clinic, this pervasive commercial location surveillance represents an immediate threat.

In Part 1 of this series, we urged lawmakers to protect people from the growing harms of location tracking tools across all areas of public life. The real-world consequences of this unregulated market impact us all. An anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy group spent millions of dollars buying app location data to track priests across multiple dioceses and used app-harvested location data to “out” a priest after purchasing his Grindr location signals. Privacy advocates posing as pr