alt Hacker NewsFBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms
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I'd really like to just have legislation to treat location data like audio or video under wiretapping provisions. If you collect my location info and convey it to a third party without my consent or a reasonable good-faith belief that I would consent, that ought to be treated similarly to recording without consent.
And consent needs to be granted explicitly for each party that might get access to my location, you can't just get blanket consent to sell my location to anyone, especially not with real-time identifiable location data.
The supreme court had a 5-4 decision related to this [1]. Was there something specific, in that decision, that leaves a loophole open?
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
There was a great talk at the Chaos Computer Conference a few years ago how to diy this, sadly cant find it because web search seems dead nowaydays. If anyone knows, please chip in. It was a german researcher following german politicians who hilariously(scandalously?) related travel patterns
Perhaps we could overturn the third party doctrine. With legislation, preferably. And while we are at it, solve the underlying issue of pervasive data collection and sharing in the first place.
I don’t thinks there’s any person who doesn’t know this information already, yet you keep seeing the same empty articles of “oh yes they collect your data using commercial apps”.. list all these apps to consumers, list the services too, list the companies that are selling them, so people will stop using them or at least limit its access. I know most social media are, but there are far more companies and apps that are willing to sell such data.
Isn't this is just a naked reach around the 4th amendment?!
Nobody has explained to me how iOS ad SDKs across different apps can track individual users given that there hasn't been an accessible GUID on iOS for many years now.
In the US we live in a bizarre world of dual expectations.
The government is supposed to follow the law, be accountable, transparent, and must operate within a constrained, circumscribed zone of activity which is debated and discussed. That's at least how it's supposed to work.
Private companies are understood as amoral sharks who have no obligation to do anything other than operate in their narrowest self-interest, and the law is used as a club to beat them back from what they so clearly want to do, and will do if at all possible. They are unaccountable to anything other than the legal system and their share price. Suggesting that they might have any further obligation is tantamount to questioning whether capitalism should exist. It happens all the time on HN.
So of course the FBI would like to keep their hands mostly clean by having one of those accepted-to-be-horrible companies gather this data and then buy the resulting trove.
That's the job of the FBI - to investigate domestic crimes. But, why do private organizations so willingly participate in the tracking ecosystem? I suppose they're in the, "you have nothing to worry about if you're not doing anything illegal" camp! Hopefully they understand that they have the most to lose.
Apple should take care of this. I would pay. Sadly it has gotten to this point
I have to give my age to my OS.
Yet they can't write a law to make this basic practice illegal.
Why do I feel like I'm not being represented _at all_?
The government shouldn’t be able to contract out anything it isn’t permitted to do directly itself. We should have this in the law, get rid of qualified immunity for everyone including lawmakers, and reign in the government.
Yikes. Why are private organizations so happy to participate in mass surveillance.
Some citizens are exempt. Wired magazine got cell phone movement data to and from Little Saint James and found a lot of visitor locations. The FBI is not interested:
https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
To be fair they are only doing that in order to track if his honeypot brib^de isnt cheating on him.
Might be cheaper than round the clock SWAT teams https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/kash-patel-gi...
A generation ago our leaders derided China (and Russia) for this kind of pervasive spying on it's citizens. In the US we did the same thing just increasing costs by enriching the private sector on the way. That's not better. That's worse.
This should be a surprise to absolutely no one. I think it sucks, but I also don't think it's anything new.
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They hate us for our freedom.
Also, isn't this breaking the constitution? It bypasses needing a warrant respectively having a objective suspicion.
Who's selling the data is the far more serious issue here. Behind this is a remarkably well-structured syndicate. The supply chain looks something like this: consumer apps embed ad SDKs → those SDKs feed location signals into RTB ad exchanges → surveillance-oriented firms sit in the RTB pipeline and harvest bid request data even without winning auctions → that data flows to aggregators who don't have any direct relationship with consumers → and from there it's sold to government agencies, among others. The genius of this structure is that accountability dissolves at every layer. Each intermediary can claim they're just passing along "commercially available data." Nobody verifies whether consumers actually consented to their location data being collected and resold. The consent verification is always someone else's job. The real problem is that this data is buyable at all, by anyone, through an opaque multi-layered supply chain specifically designed so that no single entity bears responsibility for the end result.