ICE buys tool that tracks millions of phone locations daily

New reporting from 404 Media ($) reveals U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has access to a tool called Tangles that can track the location data of millions of phones daily.

(ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.

As Joe Menn commented on Bluesky: "ICE will see where almost everyone is."

According to Forbes ($), ICE spent at least $2 million specifically for Tangles, which "scours the open internet and the dark web for information relevant to police investigations with AI tying together data on people of interest."

404 (as usual) does a great job of explaining how the data gets collected from ordinary phone apps to begin with. Apps on our phones are sharing (knowingly or inadvertently) the person's location data with companies, which then sell that location data with law enforcement agencies like ICE. Worse, ICE doesn't need a warrant to sift through Americans' location data, since it can simply purchase the data in bulk from a commercial vendor instead.

Using an ad-blocker, even for your phone, has never been more important.