U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have bought access to and used large volumes of people’s cell phone location information extracted from smartphone apps.
The files, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) obtained through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, detail the millions of taxpayer dollars DHS used to buy access to cell phone location information, which was aggregated and sold by two data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street.