OPINION
COCHRAN, J.,
delivered the opinion of the Court
in which KELLER, P.J., and MEYERS, PRICE, WOMACK, JOHNSON, HERVEY, and ALCALA, JJ„ joined.
This case raises the issue of whether a person retains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone when that phone is being temporarily stored in a jail property room.1 The trial judge granted Anthony Granville’s motion to suppress, concluding that the high-school student did not lose his legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone simply because it was being stored in the jail property room after he had been arrested for a Class C misdemeanor. The court of appeals affirmed that ruling.2 We granted the SPA’s petition for discretionary review, but we reject its argument that a modern-day cell phone is like a pair of pants or a bag of groceries, for which a person loses all privacy protection once it is checked into a jail property room. We therefore affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.
I.
One morning, Anthony Granville was arrested for the Class C offense of causing a disturbance on the school bus. His cell phone was taken from him during the booking procedure and placed in the jail property room. Later that day, Officer Harrell, a Huntsville Police “School Resources Officer,” was told that, the day before he was arrested, Mr. Granville had used his cell phone to take a photograph of another student urinating in the boys’ bathroom. Officer Harrell, who was not involved in arresting Mr. Granville, then drove to the jail and retrieved the cell phone from the jail property room. He examined its contents without first getting a warrant. The officer turned on the phone, which had been turned off. He went through it until he found the photograph he was looking for, then took the phone to his office, and printed a copy of the photograph. He kept the phone as evidence.
Mr. Granville was charged with the state-jail felony of Improper Photography, and he filed a motion to suppress, arguing that Officer Harrell could not search his cell phone without a warrant. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, both Officer Harrell and the prosecutor contended that if an officer has probable cause, he may search anything in the jail [403]*403property room that belongs to a jail inmate. There are no exceptions. The trial judge tested this hypothesis by asking the prosecutor, “[D]o you agree that there is an expectation of privacy on the information the person has on their cell phone?” The prosecutor responded, “If you have it in your possession and not committed a crime, sure.” She elaborated further:
I think if you’re in the Walker County jail you have no expectation of privacy in the personal effects that you had on you at the time that you were arrested.... His expectation of privacy is diminished in those effects until he can and does exhibit subjective expectations through his conduct, presumably at the time of his release from detainment or incarceration.
Defense counsel disagreed: “[I]t is clear that everybody in this room has some subjective belief that their cell phone is private and it doesn’t matter if it is lawfully seized by the cops.”
The trial judge posed the legal issue nicely:
So if I get arrested for jay walking out here this afternoon and get put in jail, any officer in town can go out there and go through my phone, cell phone, and might discover that I have a picture of Prometheus chained to a rock in the mountains and an eagle eating his liver out?
Yes, said the State; “If an officer has probable cause to believe that you committed a crime or evidence of that crime [is] on your phone, then, yes he can look at it. Otherwise, no he can’t look at your phone because he wants to. He has to have probable cause.”
After studying the law, the trial judge granted the motion to suppress and entered findings of fact, concluding that the cell phone was the personal property of Anthony Granville; Officer Harrell took possession of it without a warrant; and the officer “searched the contents of the cell phone until he found the photograph he sought.”3 Based on his factual findings, the trial judge concluded that Anthony [404]*404Granville had a subjective, reasonable, and legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone “even when that cell phone [was] in the jail inventory of an accused.” Because Officer Harrell had neither a search warrant nor exigent circumstances to make a warrantless search of that phone, the trial judge granted the motion to suppress.4
The State appealed, and the court of appeals affirmed, finding that (1) a person “has a general, reasonable expectation of privacy in the data contained in or accessible by his cell, now ‘smart’ phone,”5 and (2) a person continues to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone even though it has been placed in a jail property room for safekeeping.6 The court of appeals ended its opinion with a rhetorical flourish, noting that “[a] cell phone is not a pair of pants,” like the pants and shoes whose warrantless seizure from the jail property room and later search and testing we upheld in Oles v. State.7
II.
Appellate courts afford almost total deference to a trial judge’s findings of fact in a suppression hearing as long as those factual findings are supported by the record.8 We also view his factual findings in the light most favorable to his ruling.9
[405]*405The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.”10 The term “papers and effects” obviously carried a different connotation in the late eighteenth century than it does today. No longer are they stored only in desks, cabinets, satchels, and folders. Our most private information is now frequently stored in electronic devices such as computers, laptops, iPads, and cell phones, or in “the cloud” and accessible by those electronic devices.11 But the “central concern underlying the Fourth Amendment” has remained the same throughout the centuries; it is “the concern about giving police officers unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person’s private effects.”12 This is a case about rummaging through a citizen’s electronic private effects-a cell phone-without a warrant.
A. Standing: A Cell Phone Owner Has Both a Subjective and Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in His Cell Phone.
A person has “standing” to contend that a search or seizure was unreasonable if (1) he has a subjective expectation of privacy in the place or object searched, and (2) society is prepared to recognize that expectation as “reasonable” or “legitimate.”13 The “standing” doctrine ensures that a person may claim only that his own rights have been violated; he cannot assert that he is entitled to benefit because the rights of another have been violated.14 A person’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches is a personal right that cannot be asserted vicariously.15
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OPINION
COCHRAN, J.,
delivered the opinion of the Court
in which KELLER, P.J., and MEYERS, PRICE, WOMACK, JOHNSON, HERVEY, and ALCALA, JJ„ joined.
This case raises the issue of whether a person retains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone when that phone is being temporarily stored in a jail property room.1 The trial judge granted Anthony Granville’s motion to suppress, concluding that the high-school student did not lose his legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone simply because it was being stored in the jail property room after he had been arrested for a Class C misdemeanor. The court of appeals affirmed that ruling.2 We granted the SPA’s petition for discretionary review, but we reject its argument that a modern-day cell phone is like a pair of pants or a bag of groceries, for which a person loses all privacy protection once it is checked into a jail property room. We therefore affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.
I.
One morning, Anthony Granville was arrested for the Class C offense of causing a disturbance on the school bus. His cell phone was taken from him during the booking procedure and placed in the jail property room. Later that day, Officer Harrell, a Huntsville Police “School Resources Officer,” was told that, the day before he was arrested, Mr. Granville had used his cell phone to take a photograph of another student urinating in the boys’ bathroom. Officer Harrell, who was not involved in arresting Mr. Granville, then drove to the jail and retrieved the cell phone from the jail property room. He examined its contents without first getting a warrant. The officer turned on the phone, which had been turned off. He went through it until he found the photograph he was looking for, then took the phone to his office, and printed a copy of the photograph. He kept the phone as evidence.
Mr. Granville was charged with the state-jail felony of Improper Photography, and he filed a motion to suppress, arguing that Officer Harrell could not search his cell phone without a warrant. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, both Officer Harrell and the prosecutor contended that if an officer has probable cause, he may search anything in the jail [403]*403property room that belongs to a jail inmate. There are no exceptions. The trial judge tested this hypothesis by asking the prosecutor, “[D]o you agree that there is an expectation of privacy on the information the person has on their cell phone?” The prosecutor responded, “If you have it in your possession and not committed a crime, sure.” She elaborated further:
I think if you’re in the Walker County jail you have no expectation of privacy in the personal effects that you had on you at the time that you were arrested.... His expectation of privacy is diminished in those effects until he can and does exhibit subjective expectations through his conduct, presumably at the time of his release from detainment or incarceration.
Defense counsel disagreed: “[I]t is clear that everybody in this room has some subjective belief that their cell phone is private and it doesn’t matter if it is lawfully seized by the cops.”
The trial judge posed the legal issue nicely:
So if I get arrested for jay walking out here this afternoon and get put in jail, any officer in town can go out there and go through my phone, cell phone, and might discover that I have a picture of Prometheus chained to a rock in the mountains and an eagle eating his liver out?
Yes, said the State; “If an officer has probable cause to believe that you committed a crime or evidence of that crime [is] on your phone, then, yes he can look at it. Otherwise, no he can’t look at your phone because he wants to. He has to have probable cause.”
After studying the law, the trial judge granted the motion to suppress and entered findings of fact, concluding that the cell phone was the personal property of Anthony Granville; Officer Harrell took possession of it without a warrant; and the officer “searched the contents of the cell phone until he found the photograph he sought.”3 Based on his factual findings, the trial judge concluded that Anthony [404]*404Granville had a subjective, reasonable, and legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone “even when that cell phone [was] in the jail inventory of an accused.” Because Officer Harrell had neither a search warrant nor exigent circumstances to make a warrantless search of that phone, the trial judge granted the motion to suppress.4
The State appealed, and the court of appeals affirmed, finding that (1) a person “has a general, reasonable expectation of privacy in the data contained in or accessible by his cell, now ‘smart’ phone,”5 and (2) a person continues to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone even though it has been placed in a jail property room for safekeeping.6 The court of appeals ended its opinion with a rhetorical flourish, noting that “[a] cell phone is not a pair of pants,” like the pants and shoes whose warrantless seizure from the jail property room and later search and testing we upheld in Oles v. State.7
II.
Appellate courts afford almost total deference to a trial judge’s findings of fact in a suppression hearing as long as those factual findings are supported by the record.8 We also view his factual findings in the light most favorable to his ruling.9
[405]*405The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.”10 The term “papers and effects” obviously carried a different connotation in the late eighteenth century than it does today. No longer are they stored only in desks, cabinets, satchels, and folders. Our most private information is now frequently stored in electronic devices such as computers, laptops, iPads, and cell phones, or in “the cloud” and accessible by those electronic devices.11 But the “central concern underlying the Fourth Amendment” has remained the same throughout the centuries; it is “the concern about giving police officers unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person’s private effects.”12 This is a case about rummaging through a citizen’s electronic private effects-a cell phone-without a warrant.
A. Standing: A Cell Phone Owner Has Both a Subjective and Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in His Cell Phone.
A person has “standing” to contend that a search or seizure was unreasonable if (1) he has a subjective expectation of privacy in the place or object searched, and (2) society is prepared to recognize that expectation as “reasonable” or “legitimate.”13 The “standing” doctrine ensures that a person may claim only that his own rights have been violated; he cannot assert that he is entitled to benefit because the rights of another have been violated.14 A person’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches is a personal right that cannot be asserted vicariously.15
Courts have held that (1) a person has a subjective expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone,16 and (2) this [406]*406expectation of privacy is one that society recognizes as reasonable and legitimate.17
A person’s subjective expectation of privacy in a cell phone that he owns and possesses is supported by decades of cases on “standing.”18 A defendant normally has “standing” to challenge the search of places and objects that he owns. For example, a homeowner has standing to challenge a search of his home.19 And a per[407]*407son generally has standing to challenge the search or seizure of a car he owns.20
A “legitimate” expectation of privacy acknowledges the lawfulness of the person’s “subjective” expectation of privacy. As the Supreme Court has explained,
a “legitimate” expectation of privacy by definition means more than a subjective expectation of not being discovered. A burglar plying his trade in a summer cabin during the off season may have a thoroughly justified subjective expectation of privacy, but it is not one which the law recognizes as “legitimate.” His presence ... is “wrongful”; his expectation is not “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” And it would, of course, be merely tautological to fall back on the notion that those expectations of privacy which are legitimate depend primarily on cases deciding exclusionary-rule issues in criminal cases. Legitimation of expectations of privacy by law must have a source outside of the Fourth Amendment, either by reference to concepts of real or personal property law or to understandings that are recognized and permitted by society. One of the main rights attaching to property is the right to exclude others, ... and one who owns or lawfully possesses or controls property will in all likelihood have a legitimate expectation of privacy by virtue of this right to exclude.21
The factors that courts use in deciding whether a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the place or object searched include the following:
(1) whether the defendant had a proprietary or possessory interest in the place or object searched;22
(2) whether the defendant’s presence in or on the place searched was legitimate;
(3) whether the defendant had a right to exclude others from the place or object;
[408]*408(4) whether the defendant took normal precautions, prior to the search, which are customarily taken to protect privacy in the place or object;
(5) whether the place or object searched was put to a private use;
(6) whether the defendant’s claim of privacy is consistent with historical notion of privacy.23
Ownership or legal possession of the property searched is not the “be-all-end-all” in deciding whether a person has a legitimate expectation of privacy in it. But courts commonly find that a person has a legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone because of its “ability to store large amounts of private data” both in the cell phone itself and by accessing remote services.24 This data may involve the most intimate details of a person’s individual life, including text messages, emails, banking, medical, or credit card information, pictures, and videos.25 A cell phone is unlike other containers as it can receive, store, and transmit an almost unlimited amount of private information.26
[409]*409The potential for invasion of privacy, identity theft, or, at a minimum, public embarrassment is enormous.27
B. An Arrestee Normally Has an Expectation of Privacy in the Contents of his Cell Phone That Is Being Temporarily Stored in a Jail Property Room.
Although a person may have a reasonable and legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone, he may lose that expectation under some circumstances, such as if he abandons his cell phone,28 lends it to others to use, or gives his consent to its search.29 Courts across the country have wrestled with questions of when he might lose his reasonable expectation of privacy in other situations, perhaps if he is arrested and police perform a search of his cell phone incident to arrest30 or, as here, of his cell phone stored in the jail property room.
[410]*410Under the Fourth Amendment, police officers may search an arres-tee incident to a lawful arrest.31 The justification for permitting such a warrantless search is (1) the need for officers to seize weapons or other things which might be used to assault on officer or effect an escape, and (2) the need to prevent the loss or destruction of evidence.32 A search is incident to arrest only if it is “substantially contemporaneous” with the arrest and is confined to the area within the immediate control of the arrestee.33 Thus, a search incident to arrest cannot normally be justified if the “ ‘search is remote in time or place from the arrest’ ... or no exigency exists.”34
In United States v. Edwards,35 the Supreme Court recognized an exception to the “substantially contemporaneous” search-incident-to-arrest doctrine and upheld a warrantless search of an arrestee’s clothes at the police station ten hours after the arrest.36 In Edwards, the police took the arrestee’s clothes to look for evidence of paint chips that would match samples [411]*411that had been taken from the window of the post office during the attempted burglary.37 The police waited these ten hours because “it was late at night” and they had no other clothes for Edwards to wear; “it would certainly have been unreasonable for the police to have stripped [Edwards] of his clothing and left him exposed in his cell throughout the night.”38 The Court cautioned, however, that in upholding this particular search and seizure of an arres-tee’s clothing, it had “not conclud[ed] that the Warrant Clause of the Fourth Amendment is never applicable to postarrest seizures of the effects of an arrestee.”39
We relied upon the Edwards ruling and rationale in Oles v. State,40 in holding that the warrantless search of an arrestee’s clothing was not unlawful because the defendant failed to establish a subjective and reasonable expectation of privacy in the clothing he wore when arrested and that had been placed in the jail property room.41 We explained that “arrestees do retain some level of privacy interest in the personal effects or belongings taken from them incident to their arrest,”42 but that there is a lesser subjective expectation of privacy and a lesser societal expectation of privacy in inventoried property.43 Of course, there is a vast difference between the privacy interests and expectations in clothing that one is wearing when arrested and certain other possessions that one might have with them.
Indeed, just a few years after deciding Edwards, the Supreme Court addressed the scenario of a 200-pound footlocker that had been seized when the defendant was arrested leaving a train station, but that was not searched until 90 minutes later and was no longer in the arrestee’s possession.44 The Court held that the evidence obtained from that search must be suppressed because the footlocker “was property not immediately associated with the arrestee” at the time of the search.
[O]nce law enforcement officers have reduced luggage or other personal property not immediately associated with the person of the arrestee to their exclusive control, and there is no longer any danger that the arrestee might gain access to the property to seize a weapon or [412]*412destroy evidence, a search of that property is no longer incident to the arrest.45
In such circumstances, the police may legitimately “seize” the property and hold it while they seek a search warrant.46 But they may not embark upon a general, evidence-gathering search, especially of a cell phone which contains “much more personal information ... than could ever fit in a wallet, address book, briefcase, or any of the other traditional containers that the government has invoked.”47
With that general background, we turn to the present case.
III.
In this case, the court of appeals summarized its holding and reasoning as follows:
Due to the potential invasiveness of the search, Granville’s status as a pretrial detainee, the fact that his stay in jail for a class C misdemeanor would be of short duration, the utter lack of any nexus between the cell phone and the crime for which appellant was jailed, and the lack of evidence suggesting that the phone and its contents posed any risk to the jail’s penalogical interest, we conclude that society would recognize his continued, and reasonable, privacy interest in the instrument despite his temporary detention.48
The .SPA argues that the court of appeals erred because an arrestee “has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the personal effects immediately associated with his person at the time of lawful arrest.” 49 In the SPA’s view, Oles was “incorrect to hold that expectations of privacy in jail are only diminished-rather than nonexistent-and the court of appeals’[s] decision results directly from that holding and the unnecessary analysis performed to decide that case.”50 According to the SPA, when a citizen is arrested for any offense, such as failing to wear a seat belt,51 everything that the person possessed at the time of that arrest-purse, briefcase, laptop computer, cell phone, medical records, IRS returns, trade secret information-is subject to a warrantless search because all of that citizen’s privacy interests have completely disappeared. We cannot agree with this reasoning.
First, the SPA fails to distinguish between a search incident to arrest and a [413]*413search of an arrestee’s personal property that has already been inventoried and placed in storage. As the Supreme Court recently explained in Arizona v. Gant,52 the search incident to an arrest exception to the warrant requirement is premised upon promoting officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence relating to the crime for which the person was arrested.53 Although Gant involved the search of a car, courts have discussed its application to other situations in which “the item searched is removed from the suspect’s control between the time of his arrest and the time of the search.”54 Some courts have applied Gant in rejecting the lawfulness of a search of the contents of an arrestee’s cell phone.55
[414]*414Second, the SPA makes the false analogy that, if a jail detainee does not have any privacy rights in his jail cell,56 he therefore does not have any privacy rights in his personal property that is being safeguarded in the jail property room. The assumption that prisoners or pretrial detainees are without any Fourth Amendment rights is not supported by the Supreme Court. As a unanimous Court noted in 1974:
Lawful imprisonment necessarily makes unavailable many rights and privileges of the ordinary citizen, a “retraction justified by the considerations underlying our penal system.” ... But though his rights may be diminished by the needs and exigencies of the institutional environment, a prisoner is not wholly stripped of constitutional protections when he is imprisoned for crime. There is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.57
Oles correctly held that jail detainees enjoy a diminished expectation of privacy, not that a detainee has absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy.58 Furthermore, the security rationale and “needs of the institution” that underpin the diminished expectation of privacy in a jail cell is not equally applicable to property that jailers have already inventoried and are safeguarding in the property room.59
[415]*415Third, the SPA contends that, under Oles, any search of any property in the custody of jail officials is permissible. We disagree with that absolutist position and agree with the court of appeals that the object of the search makes all the difference between this situation and that in Oles.60 There, the police seized and tested a pair of pants and shoes for blood. We noted that the first question was “whether an arrestee retains any expectation of privacy in clothing lawfully taken and inventoried by police incident to an arrest.”61 After analyzing various precedent, we concluded that “arrestees do retain some level of privacy interest in the personal effects or belongings taken from them incident to their arrest,” but that
[reviewing this search under a totality of the circumstances, there is virtually no evidence that [defendant] harbored a subjective expectation of privacy in his clothing that was in the custody of the police, nor is there evidence that society would deem such a belief reasonable under these circumstances. [Defendant] has failed to meet his burden of proof in establishing a legitimate expectation of privacy in his clothing.62
That is the general doctrine concerning privacy interests in clothing, but clothing does not contain private banking or medical information and records; it does not contain highly personal emails, texts, photographs, videos, or access to a wide variety of other data about the individual citizen, his friends and family. Searching a person’s cell phone is like searching his home desk, computer, bank vault, and medicine cabinet all at once. There is no doubt that the Fourth Amendment protects the subjective and reasonable privacy interest of citizens in their homes and in their personal “papers and effects.” Conversely, clothing, like the shoes seized and tested in Oles, is displayed every time a citizen walks out into the world. As now-Presiding Judge Keller noted in her concurrence in Oles,
The outside of a person’s shoes while being worn are constantly exposed to the public. When [the defendant] was arrested and incarcerated, the police obtained lawful possession of his shoes. Given that the outside of the shoes are [416]*416constantly exposed to the public, appellant could not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a visual inspection of the shoes, on the outside, with the naked eye.63
Similarly, here, the officers could have reasonably inspected the outside of appellant’s cell phone; they could have tested it for fingerprints or DNA material because portions of the cell phone are routinely exposed to the public. But we do not think that a citizen, including appellant, has lost his expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone merely because he has been arrested and his cell phone is in the custody of police for safekeeping.
Although some courts have held that a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone when he is subjected to a search incident to arrest,64 citizens themselves have become increasingly concerned about privacy expectations and their cell phones,65 even before the current NSA phone controversy.66
[417]*417In sum, we conclude, as did the court of appeals, that a cell phone is not like a pair of pants or a shoe. Given modern technology and the incredible amount of personal information stored and accessible on a cell phone, we hold that a citizen does not lose his reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone merely because that cell phone is being stored in a jail property room. Officer Harrell could have seized appellant’s phone and held it while he sought a search warrant, but, even with probable cause, he could not “activate and search the contents of an inventoried cellular phone” without one. We answer “No” to the SPA’s sole question for review, and we affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.
KELLER, P.J., filed a concurring opinion in which PRICE, J., joined.
KEASLER, J., filed a dissenting opinion.