Feds are tracking phone locations with data bought from brokers

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

According to documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Homeland Security has been buying location data from third parties.

Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were able to purchase vast amounts of this location data without any judicial oversight and use it to track the movements of millions of cellphones within the US, according to documents.

Obtaining data about domestic communications directly from the providers requires a warrant which must be approved by a judge. Purchasing data from other people's organizations gives law enforcement agencies carte blanche to gather personal data that they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

The amount of location data disclosed in the newly released documents is huge and points towards an even greater level of data acquisition being carried out by the agencies concerned After a lawsuit was filed in 2020, the documents were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under freedom of information laws.

A subset of location data purchased by the Customs and Border Protection was included in some of the records released to the American Civil Liberties Union. According to the analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, the records contained more than 113,000 location points over a three-day period in June. This data is limited to a single geographic area in the Southwest, suggesting that it is only a small portion of the total location data obtained by federal agencies.

The data broker claims to process over 15 billion location data points per day and collect location data from more than 250 million mobile devices.

Babel Street is another data broker. Babel Street gets location data by paying developers to include snippets of its code in other mobile apps, which it then sends back to the company. According to a report in 2021, Venntel had a contract with the Florida Department of Correction to give information on any cellphones that were near prisons.

Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement that data brokers should be regulated by the government.

Wessler said that the Supreme Court made clear that the cell phone location history revealed so many privileges of life that it deserved full Fourth Amendment protection. Data brokers and government agencies are trying to explain how people don't have an expectation of privacy when it comes to location information. Congress needs to end this practice because of the high risk of abuse.

Congress will have a chance to act soon. The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday on the topic of digital dragnets and access to sensitive data. Elizabeth Warren had proposed a bill that would prohibit data brokers from selling location or health data.