What Patel Said
At a recent Senate hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked FBI Director Kash Patel a simple question: would the FBI commit to not buying Americans' location data from commercial data brokers?
Patel declined. He told the committee the FBI "uses all tools" available and "purchases commercially available information." That is the most direct on-the-record admission to date that the federal government is paying for the data it cannot obtain through a warrant.
How Data Brokers Operate
Every app on your phone with location permissions is potentially selling that data. The buyer is not always who you think. Weather apps, food delivery apps, gas station apps, free games — many monetize location data through third parties.
Those third parties aggregate the data into massive databases — billions of location pings per day, tied to advertising IDs that can usually be reverse-engineered back to individual people. Then they sell that data to advertisers, hedge funds, private investigators, foreign governments, and yes, US law enforcement.
The Constitutional Loophole
The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for the government to search your "papers and effects." The Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that location data is protected. But there is a loophole: if a third party already has the data, the government can buy it without triggering Fourth Amendment protections.
This is the "third-party doctrine," and it is the largest privacy loophole in American law. Tech companies and app developers harvest your data. Brokers aggregate it. Government buys it. No warrant needed at any stage.
Who Is Buying
FBI is the latest confirmed buyer, but they are far from alone. ICE has spent millions on location data from brokers like Venntel. The IRS has used commercial data sources. Multiple state and local police departments use products like Fog Reveal that aggregate data from hundreds of apps.
The Department of Defense purchased data from a Muslim prayer app with 98 million users. The Treasury Department uses commercial financial data. The intelligence community broadly is one of the largest customers for data broker products.
How to Reduce Your Footprint
You cannot fully escape the system. But you can dramatically reduce what brokers know about you.
1. Audit your phone's location permissions. Most apps do not need always-on location. Set them to "While Using" or revoke entirely.
2. Reset your advertising ID regularly. iOS: Settings > Privacy > Tracking. Android: Settings > Google > Ads.
3. Use a VPN to mask your IP address — this prevents one major correlation point that brokers use to tie data to individuals. NordVPN is what we recommend.
4. Opt out of major data broker databases manually — Acxiom, LexisNexis, BeenVerified, Spokeo. Some services like DeleteMe will do this for you.
5. Use privacy-respecting alternatives where possible. Signal instead of SMS. Brave or Firefox instead of Chrome. ProtonMail instead of Gmail.
The Bigger Issue
Senator Wyden has been raising this issue for years. So has the ACLU. Congress has held hearings. Bills have been introduced. Nothing has passed. The political will to close the third-party doctrine loophole does not exist because every administration — Republican or Democrat — finds it useful.
That means the responsibility for protecting your data falls on you. The government is not going to fix this. The companies profiting from it are not going to fix this. Your only option is to make yourself a smaller target.
