The government can’t confiscate your data, but it can buy it

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When the Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month To prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive health data from companies, they took a critical first step to protect our personal data. But there remains a different and serious breach in data privacy that Congress must address.

While the Constitution prevents the government from forcing companies to hand over their sensitive data without due process, there are no laws or regulations that prevent them from simply buying it.

And the US government has been buy private data for years.

Although Supreme Court judgments While the government cannot acquire sensitive personal data like your location without a court order, sketchy data brokers can and do sell this information directly to the government. They’re exploiting a loophole in our constitutional protections against surveillance: Because this data is sold on the open market, the government doesn’t need to force anyone to provide it. They can just buy it with no oversight or legal ramifications.

Congress should prohibit the government from buying sensitive geolocation data entirely, not just prevent its seizure. As long as agencies and law enforcement can legally buy this sensitive information from data brokers, constitutional limits on the government’s ability to seize this data mean next to nothing.

The FBI, the military, and various other government and regulatory agencies are frequent customers of these data brokers both at home and abroad. The data they buy gives them alarming amounts of power to collect sensitive information from large groups of people.

The biggest victims of government surveillance are often marginalized communities. For example, the military sensitive geolocation data acquired collected from a Muslim prayer app and a Muslim dating app to track users. The broker that sold the user’s geolocation data, Locate X, boasts of being “widely used” by the military, intelligence agencies and various levels of law enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also been criticized for buy user data in order to track migrants and skirt sanctuary laws.

Even the National Guard is taking advantage of the surveillance loophole, buying data to target and recruit high school students. And the The FBI buys geolocation data to track millions of phones, all without the need for a court order.

We have already seen the potentially damaging consequences of private data use and tracking by employers and owners to the detriment of workers or tenants. Putting that information in the hands of government agencies whose decisions carry the weight of the law presents an even more serious problem.

Government agencies are often reluctant to reveal how they use privately acquired data for law enforcement operations, but such purchases allow them to circumvent surveillance restrictions put in place to protect our civil rights. Police departments have been circumventing facial recognition bans by go to external providers for your facial recognition search results. In 2018, ICE claimed to have made an arrest and deportation from a “routine traffic stop,” but had also coincidentally purchased specific cell phone tower data that could have helped make the arrest.

To make matters worse, the data being sold to these powerful institutions may not even be accurate. In addition to being vulnerable to hackinginformation from data brokers is often based on discriminatory algorithms and biases and still can often confuses your age, ethnicity, and religion when creating profiles. When the government takes enforcement action based on inaccurate data, the rights of all Americans are put at risk.

Biden’s proposed protection for reproductive health data is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough on its own. Congress must ban government purchase of sensitive location data and address this huge data privacy loophole, because as long as your information is for sale, the government will continue to buy it.