Opinion of the Court
those concerns. If "the police are truly confronted with a 'now or never' situation," — for example, circumstances suggesting that a defendant's phone will be the target of an imminent remote-wipe attempt — they may be able to rely on exigent circumstances to search the phone immediately. Missouri v. McNeely, 569 U. S. ____, ____ (2013) (slip op., at 10) (quoting Roaden v. Kentucky, 413 U. S. 496, 505 (1973); some internal quotation marks omitted). Or, if officers happen to seize a phone in an unlocked state, they may be able to disable a phone's automatic-lock feature in order to prevent the phone from locking and encrypting data. See App. to Reply Brief in No. 13-132, p. 3a (diagramming the few necessary steps). Such a preventive measure could be analyzed under the principles set forth in our decision in McArthur, 531 U. S. 326, which approved officers' reasonable steps to secure a scene to preserve evidence while they awaited a warrant. See id., at 331-333.
B
The search incident to arrest exception rests not only on the heightened government interests at stake in a volatile arrest situation, but also on an arrestee's reduced privacy interests upon being taken into police custody. Robinson focused primarily on the first of those rationales. But it also quoted with approval then- Judge Cardozo's account of the historical basis for the search incident to arrest exception: "Search of the person becomes lawful when grounds for arrest and accusation have been discovered, and the law is in the act of subjecting the body of the accused to its physical dominion." 414 U. S., at 232 (quoting People v. Chiagles, 237 N. Y. 193, 197, 142 N. E. 583, 584 (1923)); see also 414 U. S., at 237 (Powell, J., concurring) ("an individual lawfully subjected to a custodial arrest retains no significant Fourth Amendment interest in the privacy of his person"). Put simply, a patdown of Robinson's cloth-
