Joseph Cox reports:
Earlier this month U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) paid nearly half a million dollars to a company that sells a product based on location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, according to public procurement records reviewed by Motherboard.
The news highlights how law enforcement agencies continue to buy data that may in some cases require a warrant or court order to obtain. This latest contract, which went to data broker Venntel and has not been previously reported, came after a government oversight committee already announced it was investigating such companies for their sale of sensitive data to agencies.
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