The U.S. Supreme Court won’t rule on whether the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone location information, dealing a setback to data privacy advocates.

Attorneys for Quartavious Davis, who was convicted of a string of robberies partly because of phone location data, had appealed the case after a lower court ruled against Davis. The Supreme Court said Monday it had declined to hear the case.

Law enforcement used records from Davis’s cellphone carrier, MetroPCS, to establish where he was during a crime spree in Florida in 2010. He was convicted and sentenced to almost 162 years in prison.

Davis’s attorneys asked a federal appeals court to throw out his conviction, arguing that collecting the cellphone location data without a warrant violated his privacy rights under the U.S. constitution.

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Source: Computer World

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