The Government Uses Targeted Advertising to Track Your Location. Here's What We Need to Do.

"The document acknowledges that a program by the agency to use "commercially available marketing location data" for surveillance drew from the process used to select the targeted ads shown to you on nearly every website and app you visit."

"ICE, CBP and the FBI have purchased location data from the data broker Venntell and used it to identify immigrants who were later arrested. Last year, ICE purchased a spy tool called Webloc that gathers the locations of millions of phones and makes it easy to search for phones within specific geographic areas over a period of time."

Federal agencies, particularly Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have been purchasing and utilizing location data from commercial advertising ecosystems to conduct warrantless surveillance and track individuals' phones. The technical systems that enable targeted advertising online have been repurposed by government agencies for tracking purposes. Law enforcement has purchased location data from brokers like Venntell and surveillance tools like Webloc to identify and locate immigrants and other targets. This practice demonstrates how the advertising industry's massive surveillance infrastructure has become accessible to government agencies for law enforcement and immigration enforcement operations.

Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation