Time to recheck your privacy settings.
There is no such thing as “off the grid” these days. Our digital lives have made an indelible imprint. All those fears about Big Brother watching aren’t that far off from reality—in fact, a new report details how the Department of Homeland Security is using smartphone data to screen travelers. U.S. citizens, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, may be monitored using artificial intelligence, Vice reports.
The Customs and Border Protection has entered a contract with Babel Street for subscription of Babel X, a platform that mines publicly available social media data. The federal agency paid $2.7 million to the company in 2019 for an annual subscription and $265,000 in 2020. The U.S. Coast Guard, the TSA, the FBI, and the State Department have also used Babel Street.
The FBI has entered into a $27 million contract with Babel X for 5,000 licenses. The agency is expected to run over 20,000 keywords every month to gather information from social media websites including Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others.
How Does It Work?
The platform Babel X lets a user enter a name, an email address, or a phone number and it gives them information about their employment history, location data, IP addresses, social media posts, and even social security number.
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Babel Street has another service called Locate X, which can offer details about someone’s location, taken from their smartphone apps. Government agencies have also been using this, not just for U.S. citizens but also for foreign travelers and asylum seekers. The U.S. Secret Service paid $36,000 to Babel on top of its $2 million social media monitoring package to get access to Locate X.
“DHS uses various forms of technology to execute its mission, including tools to support investigations related to threats to infrastructure, illegal trafficking on the dark web, cross-border transnational crime, and terrorism. DHS leverages this technology in ways that are consistent with its authorities and the law,” a representative from Customs and Border Protection told Vice’s Motherboard.
Many companies already use social media profiles to determine if a candidate is a good fit—and many employees have found themselves fired when messing up online. So will these things become a criteria for visa sanctions in future? Possibly. And it can be impossible to erase your traces once you’ve hit “Send,” so you should check your privacy settings and think twice about what you post online.
Related: I Let A.I. Plan My Entire Family Road Trip. And It Was… Fine
Location Compromised
Smartphone apps collect all sorts of data from our phones. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, tech experts warned people to delete menstrual tracking apps from their phones, fearing that authorities could use the data to incriminate those who seek abortions.
This is just one example though. Apps request access to lots of personal data on your phone—from email addresses and contact lists to locations—and these data points are sold to data brokers, who sell it to advertisers, retail businesses, investors, and governments. In 2021, a priest was outed when his location data was traced and he was found using Grindr.
It isn’t a lone incident. Time Magazine reported that location data has been used for immigration enforcement, but there is no proof that this has resulted in deportations.
As per their report, location data is a $12 billion market. This data isn’t getting sold in the traditional sense, but brokers are selling the access to companies to harvest and download this precious data from a database. Government agencies have been able to trace people without using warrants in this fashion—their personal information is already available publicly; they are just finding details they need.
Critics believe that this violates the Fourth Amendment.
A group of senators introduced The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act in 2021 to stop government agencies from buying location data or from data brokers from selling it. Senator Patrick Leahy said, “The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act closes existing legal loopholes and would require the government to secure a court order before buying Americans’ data, such as location data from our smartphones, from data brokers.”
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