The Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a high-profile ruling that violent video games are protected by the First Amendment, but a bigger technology decision could be looming. The court agreed to hear a case next term about when the government can put GPS devices on people’s cars — which could produce one of the court’s biggest privacy rulings in years.
The GPS issue is important in its own right — the government can learn a lot about us if it tracks everywhere we go by car. But just as important, the case will give the Supreme Court a chance to weigh in about the steady erosion of privacy rights in the Internet age.
At the center of the case is a straightforward question: Do the police need a search warrant to put a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle? The government says no, since it is just following a person’s movements in public . Civil libertarians insist that GPS tracking is so invasive that the Fourth Amendment requires it to have a warrant.
