https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3apja/supreme-court-carpenter-cops-need-warrant-phone-location-data > The Supreme Court of the United States just scored a huge victory for digital privacy rights, ruling that cops need a warrant to access mobile phone location data held by telecom providers. > On Friday, in a much-anticipated decision, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling of two previous courts in the case of a series of Radio Shack robberies. The lower courts convicted Timothy Carpenter mostly on the basis of 12,898 location points that showed Carpenter’s movements over 127 days, and put him near four of the robbery locations. Those locations were obtained from Carpenter’s cell phone provider. At the time, the police got that location data with a simple court order, and not a more stringent, hard to obtain, warrant.