An internal DHS document shows CBP used location data sourced from the online ad industry to track phone locations; ICE has bought access to similar tools
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples' precise movements over time …
404 MediaJoseph Cox
Context & Ripple Effects
This disclosure extends a years-long record of immigration agencies obtaining phone-location intelligence through commercial products, including the earlier reported use of Locate X by CBP and ICE. It makes the advertising-data supply chain—not only specialized surveillance vendors—central to that record.
The issue also returns after a DHS finding that location-data use by ICE, CBP and the Secret Service was illegal, alongside reports of a CBP official tracking coworkers without an investigative purpose. The new document provides another concrete point of scrutiny over how purchased data is governed inside DHS.
First-order effects
CBP's use of advertising-sourced location data is now documented internally, increasing accountability pressure on the agency's procurement and data-access controls.
ICE's purchase of similar tools places both immigration agencies under renewed scrutiny over the same commercial location-data channel.
Second-order effects
Data brokers, ad-tech intermediaries and location-intelligence vendors may face more questions from customers, watchdogs and policymakers about whether ostensibly commercial data is enabling government tracking.
If agencies can repeatedly obtain movement histories through commercial markets, privacy protections will increasingly depend on limits governing downstream buyers rather than on whether collection began in an app or ad system.
The case strengthens the broader policy question of whether data marketed as commercial can retain meaningful consent boundaries once it is repurposed for government surveillance.
The trend: Government access to commercially collected personal data is making the ad-tech ecosystem an increasingly consequential part of the surveillance-policy debate.
AI makes deanonymizing bulk data easier than ever. We need to make clear that the government deanonymizing data counts as illegal surveillance on citizens. And pass some common sense digital privacy laws. The government shouldn't passively track innocent Americans!
This is the exact sort of surveillance explicitly permitted by the DoD's contract with OpenAI. This document repeatedly states that cell phone data to track your every move is not “personally identifiable information” - but the contract only bans working with PII, so this clears!…
“[CDT's] Jake Laperruque Laperruque [] tells WIRED that while Palantir isn't the company harvesting people's data, it enables ICE to analyze data it obtains from other sources. In doing so, it enables the agency's larger surveillance apparatus.”
So while this administration is consolidating our government identity information and law enforcement is buying everything else that is commercially available, and it all goes into the big DOGE cauldron of AI chaos, all data is now the same data.
my near-obsessive ad blocking on every platform used to just be about stopping the advertising platforms from knowing about me... and did the whole Manifest v3 ad blocking mess ever get sorted out? Using Edge I still get v2 which blocks before download so I've got uBlock Origin …
Today a group of ~70 lawmakers are urging the oversight body of DHS to investigate ICE's location data purchase we recently revealed. DHS previously ICE, CBP, Secret Service all used the data illegally. Letter says ICE is stonewalling congressional oversight www.404media.co/cbp…