Your daily app usage just became a federal investigation tool. ICE published a request on January 23rd seeking commercial advertising technology and location data to power criminal, civil, and administrative investigations—essentially asking the ad tech industry to become a surveillance contractor.
The Ad Tech Surveillance Machine
Commercial data brokers already track your movements for advertisers—now ICE wants in.
The advertising technology ecosystem routinely harvests precise location coordinates, device identifiers, and behavioral signals from mobile apps and websites. Companies like Venntel, Thomson Reuters, and others aggregate this information to help brands target consumers.
ICE’s Request for Information signals the agency wants to repurpose this commercial surveillance infrastructure for federal investigations rather than build custom tracking tools from scratch. This isn’t formal procurement yet—ICE frames it as market research. But the agency plans to select vendors for live demonstrations, typically the step before pilot programs and actual contracts get signed.
Constitutional Concerns Left Unaddressed
The RFI mentions “privacy expectations” but skips warrants, court orders, and judicial oversight.
Privacy advocates immediately raised red flags. “It is a really troubling distillation of the alignment between commercial surveillance and state surveillance that has been growing for a long time now,” said John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The RFI provides zero detail on constitutional safeguards. No mention of warrants. No discussion of probable cause. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations handles criminal cases alongside civil and administrative enforcement—meaning your location data could support immigration raids under far lower legal thresholds than criminal prosecutions require.
The Incremental Normalization Playbook
ICE has used similar market research to quietly expand surveillance capabilities before formal adoption.
This follows a familiar pattern. ICE already purchases facial recognition technology and works with Palantir to identify home addresses. An October 2025 RFI sought social media monitoring tools, noting that “individuals targeted for enforcement action purposely employ countermeasures to inhibit ICE’s ability to locate them.”
The strategy bypasses traditional legal barriers by purchasing data that private companies collected under consumer privacy policies. Since agencies argue purchasing commercial data doesn’t constitute a Fourth Amendment “search,” they can potentially avoid warrant requirements—a legal theory the Supreme Court has increasingly questioned.
Your smartphone’s advertising ID connects to a surveillance economy that government agencies now treat as their personal intelligence service. The only question is whether lawmakers will catch up before this becomes standard practice across federal law enforcement.
