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Secret Service bought location data pulled from common apps:
The Secret Service paid a private company for access to location data generated by common smartphone apps, Motherboard reports. Internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the agency spent $35,844 for a one-year subscription to Babel Street's product Locate X, which tracks the location of devices via data harvested from popular apps.
As Motherboard notes, the glaring issue with this contract is that it allows the law enforcement agency to buy information that it would normally need a warrant or a court order to obtain.
[...] In March, Protocol reported that US Customs and Border Protection purchased Locate X, and a former Babel Street employee told Protocol that the Secret Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using the location-tracking tech. But Motherboard has the first confirmation that the Secret Service did in fact purchase Locate X.
[...] Senator Ron Wyden is reportedly planning legislation to block law enforcement from purchasing products like Locate X.
"It is clear that multiple federal agencies have turned to purchasing Americans' data to buy their way around Americans' Fourth Amendment Rights. I'm drafting legislation to close this loophole, and ensure the Fourth Amendment isn't for sale," Wyden said in a statement provided to Motherboard.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @05:21PM (6 children)
“If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 18 2020, @07:42PM (5 children)
I don't think the blame is really being placed on the "wind" (data providers) here, but rather on these particular "trees" (crooked government agencies).
From the summary:
Of course, if what the Founding Fathers(tm) wrote into the Constitution(tm) didn't keep law enforcement out of the data, what's another law going to do to change that?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 18 2020, @10:47PM (3 children)
If the wind keeps logs, and delivers those logs to the "trees", then yes, we can put some blame on the wind. Moreso when the wind profits from the delivery of those logs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:00AM
Whoever started the "wind" and "logs" thing needs to stop and think about what's going to happen to their cute analogy online.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @02:03PM (1 child)
Not when the wind has told you it blows everywhere and will happily pour your secrets to anyone it blows past. Not when the wind explicitly tells you we can take your secrets and sell them to anyone. That's your fault for not thoroughly examining what the wind has clearly told you it will do.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:26PM
Because, everyone reads every word of a EULA, a TOS, the privacy policies, etc ad nauseum. Worse, all of that legal mumbo jumbo doesn't explicitly spell out the fact that your data is sold for profit to the highest bidder.
I made mention in another discussion of visiting the American Heart Association's site, to look at using one of their health monitoring tools. All free of course. I clicked the privacy policy link, which few people probably do. It mentioned "partners", and sharing of information, blah blah blah. I learned that AHA can "share" information with just about anyone in the world, at their discretion, and that I had no rights to monitor such "sharing". It wasn't a 30 second read, either - I spent minutes reading, and finally just closed AHA's page, and got the hell out of there.
Why in hell does AHA, of all organizations, need to "share" my information with ANYONE? That data should only be shared with other organizations that I explicitly approve of, such as my personal healthcare provider(s).
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Thursday August 20 2020, @03:33PM
The data is out there for *anyone* to purchase, including Big Brother. Once it is out there you/I/we have no control over it. Is it crooked to buy anything that is on the market? Your data and my data is out there available to the highest bidder; be that FBI, China, ex-lovers, bosses, future bosses; *anyone*.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy