What do you do when you get into your car? Adjust the mirrors? The seat? Put the parking brake off? How about sweep for a GPS device the police placed on your car?

This probably won’t happen to you, but whether the police can track your movements 24/7 without a warrant is at issue in United States v. Antoine Jones. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Nov. 8.

In 2004, the FBI, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Department, placed a GPS tracking device the car of Antoine Jones — a night club owner in the District of Columbia — as part of their investigation for narcotics violations. However, they did so without a warrant. Jones contends that such an act constitutes a “search” — specifically, an unreasonable one because no warrant was obtained for it. If he’s correct, no evidence the GPS device found could be used against him as per the exclusionary rule (established in Mapp v. Ohio) because the evidence was obtained unconstitutionally, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It is not entirely clear how the Supreme Court will rule, mostly because there have not been a litany of cases regarding what constitutes a search as technology advances. Obviously, in 1789, the police could not stick a tracking device on the car that didn’t exist. So, what new technology can the police use without obtaining a warrant?

This issue mostly revolves around whether the police have intruded upon a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” which is what the Fourth Amendment protects (Katz v. U.S.). In Kyllo v. U.S., for example, the Supreme Court ruled the police could not use a heat monitor to measure the amount of heat emitted from a house (they were trying to determine whether Kyllo was likely growing marijuana in his garage), as obtaining information that could not have been otherwise obtained “without physical ‘intrusion into a constitutionally protected area’ [constitutes] a search — at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use.”

Despite that ruling, it is very hard to determine how the Court will rule on this case. Four of the justices who presided over that case have retired, and it was only a 5-4 decision to begin with. Further, there is no partisan pattern in votes. The majority contained votes from Antonin Scalia, a conservative member of the Court, to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably the Court’s most liberal justice. Further, the Kyllo wording is vague as it pertains to this case. A car is not a public area. In fact, the government uses the “mosaic theory” to defend its use of the GPS device. The theory responds to the idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy; when you drive in a car, anyone can see you — you don’t have an expectation of privacy as to your whereabouts. Thus, if the police are using a device to simply put together pieces of information that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for individually, the device is not an invasion of privacy. Second, GPS devices are in public use, at least more so than heat monitors.

The other case the government cites is also vague on this issue. In U.S. v. Knotts, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police could, without a warrant, use a beeper that could be monitored from a close proximity to track someone. However, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the GPS tracker was an unconstitutional search claimed that the Knotts case specifically reserved the question of whether such a device could be used over a prolonged period of time (this is the difference between a “reasonable expectation of privacy in [one’s] movements from one place to another” and a “reasonable expectation of privacy in [one’s] movements whatsoever, world without end.”

This Supreme Court term is filled with a plethora of blockbuster cases, and the docket will likely amass more important cases, such as one that will decide the constitutionality of the healthcare bill. U.S. v. Jones is just one of many criminal rights cases. As such, a defendant’s rights could potentially be vastly expanded over the next year. But regardless of how this case is decided, it’s likely tha as technology advances, the Supreme Court will have to adjust its doctrines to account for those advancements.