The ACLU just found out about how much the Trump admin in fact accesses data on hundreds of millions of phones…..
Remember?
That cellphone you have KNOWS were it is every minute…..
The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the records from DHS through a lawsuit it filed in 2020. It provided the documents to POLITICO and separately released them to the public on Monday.
The documents highlight conversations and contracts between federal agencies and the surveillance companies Babel Street and Venntel. They also show agency staff having internal conversations about privacy concerns on using phone location data.
In just three days in 2018, the documents show that the CBP collected data from more than 113,000 locations from phones in the Southwestern United States — equivalent to more than 26 data points per minute — without obtaining a warrant.
The documents highlight the massive scale of location data that government agencies including CBP and ICE received, and how the agencies sought to take advantage of the mobile advertising industry’s treasure trove of data.
“It was definitely a shocking amount,” said Shreya Tewari, the Brennan fellow for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “It was a really detailed picture of how they can zero in on not only a specific geographic area, but also a time period, and how much they’re collecting and how quickly.”
The location data industry is an estimated $12 billion market, made up of hundreds of apps that collect location data, data brokers who trade that information among each other, and buyers who look to use that data for purposes such as advertising and law enforcement.
Because the U.S. has no federal privacy laws to rein the industry in, location data sales have gone largely unchecked for the past decade and allowed data brokers to sell millions of people’s whereabouts to whoever’s buying….
This one’s for U jack…..