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DHS skirting Supreme Court order by using purchased location data
- kick 7y agoA 2018 court ruling had limited the U.S. government's ability to obtain location data from phone companies, but purchasing commercially available data is a way for them to sidestep the rule. That same year, ICE bought $190,000 worth of licences to data stored by Virginia-based Venntel, who describe themselves as "pioneers in mobile location information." Experts familiar with the situation say that this is one of the largest troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the United States. The data had initially been used to track human and drug-smuggling organizations but has since shared the data with ICE's arm that carries out deportations. Why is this legal? Abusing government funds to get access to location data is the worst of all worlds, for everyone involved.
- rckoepke 7y agoI noticed the McDonald's near my home is running a promotion. "Safe Driving" gets you discounts on McDonald's food. I'm in a particularly non-tech savvy area. I have not seen this is running in higher-income, higher-education neighborhoods, or any McDonalds inside universities. I didn't look into it, but I feel that the app probably uses GPS to know your location as much as possible in order to monitor "Safe Driving". I guess you could use only accelerometer data to look for hard acceleration/braking events, but I doubt that's the purpose. Seemed like a data broker trying to drum up new data sources. Edit: Coincidentally, the next YouTube ad I got after submitting this was a McDonald's ad.