## Facts

- Federal prosecutors charged Tobias Diggs and co-defendants with Hobbs Act robbery arising from the March 17, 2017 robbery of Razny Jewelers in Hinsdale, Illinois.
- Investigators identified a suspected getaway vehicle: a 2003 Lexus RX with Michigan plates, registered to Diggs’s wife, Devinn Adams; Diggs regularly drove the Lexus.
- Adams purchased the Lexus on credit from a dealer/creditor; the contract stated: “If your vehicle has an electronic tracking device, you agree that we may use this device to find the vehicle.”
- A detective learned from the dealer/creditor that the Lexus had a GPS tracking device serviced by a private vendor, and the dealer/creditor provided login credentials to access the vendor’s website.
- Without a warrant, the detective accessed the vendor’s system and downloaded historical GPS records covering March 1 through April 4, 2017.
- The GPS spreadsheet contained time-stamped location entries when the vehicle was started, roughly every five minutes while driven, and when parked, typically at block-level addresses (with software allowing more precise coordinates).
- The government asserted the GPS data placed the Lexus near the jewelry store around the time of the robbery and reflected travel patterns connecting the vehicle to relevant residences and locations.
- Diggs moved to suppress the GPS evidence; the court resolved the motion without an evidentiary hearing because no material factual disputes affected the outcome.

## Issues

1. Whether the warrantless acquisition of more than a month of historical vehicle GPS location data from a private tracking vendor constituted a Fourth Amendment search.
2. Whether the dealer/creditor’s access rights under the installment contract, or its authorization to the detective, supplied valid third-party consent or otherwise eliminated Diggs’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
3. Whether, if a search occurred, any exception to the warrant requirement justified obtaining the historical GPS records without a warrant.

## Decision

- The court granted Diggs’s motion to suppress the historical GPS data.
- The court held that obtaining the extensive historical GPS records was a Fourth Amendment search.
- The court held Diggs had a reasonable expectation of privacy in long-term location information generated by a vehicle he regularly drove.
- The court rejected the government’s third-party consent/assumption-of-risk theory based on the installment contract language.
- Because the government obtained the data without a warrant and no exception applied, the search was unreasonable and the GPS evidence was inadmissible.

## Legal Principles

- Long-term, detailed historical location information that enables reconstruction of a person’s movements implicates a reasonable expectation of privacy and generally requires a warrant for government access.
- The Fourth Amendment analysis for extensive historical location tracking follows the reasoning that such data reveals the “whole” of a person’s physical movements and is qualitatively different from ordinary business records.
- Contractual permission allowing a creditor to use a tracking device “to find the vehicle” is limited in scope and does not, without more, constitute consent to warrantless law-enforcement access to extensive historical location records.
- A person who regularly drives a vehicle may have a sufficient privacy interest to challenge government acquisition of the vehicle’s long-term location history.
- When the government obtains protected location data without a warrant and no established exception applies, suppression is the appropriate remedy.

## Conclusion

The court ruled that police conducted an unconstitutional search by obtaining over a month of detailed historical GPS location data for a vehicle regularly driven by Diggs without a warrant, and that the creditor’s contract clause and cooperation did not authorize warrantless law-enforcement access; the GPS evidence was suppressed.


United States v. Diggs, 385 F. Supp. 3d 648 (N.D. Ill. 2019)