sidestep the want to obtain a search warrant , the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) has reportedly been access speech sound localization data belong to millions of Americans by buying it straight from secret merchandising firms . The data is quarter from seemingly ordinary phone apps , include wandering game and weather apps , the Wall Street Journalreports .
DHS uses the data point purchased from private marketing party to generate constabulary enforcement leads and hunt for undocumented immigrant , according to the Journal , which first broke news of the arrangements on Friday .
In a landmark2018 decision , the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protect cellular phone fix information . As a result , police are required to obtain a warrant before obtaining position data . But according to the Journal , government lawyers have argued that a stock-purchase warrant is not required because the data is already commercially available .
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent aims his weapon from a Black Hawk helicopter while pursuing a truck with suspected undocumented immigrants on 23 March 2025 in McAllen, Texas.Photo: John Moore (Getty
https://gizmodo.com/anonymized-data-is-meaningless-bullshit-1841429952
The regime ’s procurement of location datum from private merchandising companies for law enforcement function was a secret , until now .
The Journal cover that DHS and representation under its umbrella , including Immigration and Customs Enforcement , purchased location data as far back as 2017 from a small Virginia - based company called Venntel Inc. According to the Journal , the data was recently used to tag the telephone of people suspected of smuggling drugs through a tunnel from Mexico to Arizona .
Venntel acknowledges serving government clients on its website , which tell its platform “ merges , categorizes and interprets disparate locating data . ” The caller says it provides “ orbicular coverage ” as well as access to “ historical data . ”
DHS and Venntel did not immediately reply to Gizmodo ’s asking for input .
Neither the name of the marketing business firm from which Venntel reportedly purchased the location data nor the phone apps used to collect the data are named in the Journal ’s report .
A Customs and Border Protection official told the Journal that the data is not “ ingested in bulk ” and “ does n’t include cellular headphone tower data . ” The information reportedly points to devices represented by an “ alphanumeric advertising identifier , ” but does not admit the cellphone proprietor ’s name .
Claims that locating data is anonymized — or pseudonymized — areall but meaningless . Researchers have repeatedly shown the techniques advertising companies employ to anonymize information are defective and inadequate .
Last yr , for example , researchers at the Imperial College of London published a study showing they were able to accurately re - identify99.98 percentof Americans in anonymized datasets .
And just this month , students at Harvard Universityrevealedthey’d build a cock that link up personally identifiable data to anonymized consumer data exposed by information breaches .
“ DHS should not be get at our location entropy without a warrant , disregardless whether they obtain it by paying or for detached , ” Nathan Freed Wessler , a faculty attorney with the ACLU ’s Speech , Privacy , and Technology Project , told Gizmodo . “ The failure to get a indorsement undermines Supreme Court precedent set up that the government must present probable cause to a evaluator before induce some of our most sensitive information , especially our cell earpiece location history . ”
“ We will be demanding the politics turn over all records come to this disturbing drill , which is just the latest representative of the extreme lengths the Trump government will go to channel out its vicious and hardhearted in-migration policy , ” Wessler contribute .
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