To its credit, the article covers all the reasons why the Chatrie decision won’t be determinative for this case.

But the headline and narrative paint a way too optimistic (if you’re anti-Flock) picture of Chatrie’s impact.

In particular the search identified by Chatrie (Google’s database of expected-private location records, including movement in the home and other private spaces) has almost no analog in third-party-owned recordings of public movement.

But Chatrie found that the geofence was unconstitutional because of the wide dragnet which included people not suspected of crimes, not because those people were in private spaces:

> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."

The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:

> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.

Not sure I agree. The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads. That's potentially a huge difference, certainly, but I don't think it makes the negative outcome here quite as likely as you think.

Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.

The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.

Is Flock really 3rd party? Yes, they're a private entity, but they largely owe their existence to government contracts. They maintain their database on behalf of various governments. Their primary sales pitch is to law enforcement. It feels like something completely different than Alphabet's or Meta's databases of person/user data.

I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.

It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.

Yes, while I'm not a fan of fully networked, recorded, ubiquitous license plate tracking, it is quite different than the cell phone.

License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.

This court has had little respect for precedent so maybe an argument here is more about the fact that rulings like this one may become more likely.