An abundance of cell phone location data was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security. The private information found on immigrants’ phones is leaked only because the federal government did not hesitate to allocate a portion of its budget to purchasing this cell phone location data. The unreleased records of these purchases prove that immigration enforcement is violating the Fourth Amendment by secretly accessing people’s cell phone location and information. These immigrants’ rights are being violated and infringed upon as the process of hacking into phones to track their location is completely illegal.
It has been reported that more than fifteen billion location points are gathered from over 250 million devices every single day. While this is an extreme invasion of privacy, immigration enforcement declare that they are able to “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations…” and more. It is clear that investigators have the ability to examine and track individuals and gain information about their private relations and daily lives. They also state that the tracking is through a cell phone’s numerical identifier as opposed to a name, which still does not make it right as the entire objective of this process is to track individuals and gather their private data. Individuals are unaware of the fact that their personal information is sold to the government as they do not know how many of the applications of their phones are collecting GPS data.
