Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

Joseph Cox writing for 404 Media:

Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer.

Surveillance capitalism at its finest.

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” the analysis says, referring to data collected by location data companies and sold to the government. The rationale is that the phone’s owner has provided this information willingly because they could, theoretically, remove apps gathering their location data or turn off location services altogether. (In multiple investigations into the location data industry, I’ve found apps did not always disclose _how their location data might be used or sold_, and in some cases apps still _collected data even when people opted-out_, meaning users could not have meaningfully consented.)

This shit is so complicated, and the companies lie anyway, meaning there’s pretty much no way to “opt-out” of this. The collection of this information should be illegal, full stop!