Veteran taxi driver Hassan El-Nahal accused New York City of violating the Fourth Amendment rights of cabbies by requiring that taxi vehicles be equipped with GPS monitoring.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission adopted the regulation in 2004. It would later use data collected from global-positioning systems to keep tabs on whether drivers were scamming passengers by charging higher out-of-city meter rates for trips that stayed within city limits.

Mr. El-Nahal was among dozens of drivers accused of overcharging. After successfully getting the charges against him dismissed, he sued the city. The GPS tracking, he argued, illegally trespassed on private property in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.

His case cited the 2012 landmark Supreme Court decision, United States vs. Jones, holding that attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s car amounted to a physical intrusion by the government.

A federal district judge dismissed his case in 2014, concluding that Mr. El-Nahal had no “reasonable expectation of privacy in any of the” tracking information collected.

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday refused to revive the lawsuit.

The three-judge Second Circuit panel decided the case on more technical grounds. The decision didn’t reject Mr. El-Nahal’s Fourth Amendment claim outright, and one of the judges wrote a separate opinion suggesting the argument may have merit. But Mr. El-Nahal lost his appeal anyway because the judges said it was entirely unclear if he actually had any property interest in a taxi.

“Mr. El-Nahal leaves it a mystery whether he owns a taxicab medallion, rents a taxi from a corporate owner on a daily or weekly basis, or alternates driving shifts with another driver who rents a cab,” wrote Judge Debra Ann Livingston for the panel.

In a separate opinion, Judge Rosemary Pooler wrote that she would have preferred to send the case back to the lower court to sort out the confusion.

She also took issue with the lower-court ruling, writing that it was too dismissive of the Fourth Amendment question raised in the case.

“The implied license all taxis extend to the public does not encompass an invitation to install surveillance technology in their vehicles,” she wrote.

Daniel Ackman, a lawyer for the driver, said he was disappointed by the ruling and is considering an appeal.

(Published by The Wall Street Journal - August 26, 2016)