ICE Uses Cellphone Location Data

Many cellphone apps ask for permission to access your location data. The NYT covered the issue in depth about a year-and-a-half ago, noting that vast amounts of location data is being collected about individual users and then sold.

Now the WSJ has uncovered that ICE and CBP are among the end-users of collected and sold location data. And the agencies use this data to further immigration enforcement, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, agents found an underground smuggling tunnel by using location data.

Interestingly, if the government had been trying to obtain location data by way of a search warrant, they’d come up against constitutional protections put into place by SCOTUS in the 2018 decision Carpenter. Those hurdles don’t need to be cleared when the government is instead purchasing commercially-available data.

As if we needed more reasons to click “do not allow.”

-KitJ