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Secret Service paid for location data from phone apps
June 21, 2025
The US government is facing more accusations ofbuying location datato track people down without the usual warrants and court orders.Motherboardhas learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that the Secret Service paid Babel Street to use Locate X, a secretive product that supplies location data from commonphone apps.
While it wasn’t clear from a document just what the Secret Service used the tool for,Protocolnoted that it’s used to create a virtual fence around an area and track where devices in that region had been before. If a phone near a terrorist incident was in a country linked to the attack weeks earlier, for instance, that could produce a lead for a case.
The contract for Locate X lasted between September 2017 and September 2018, and ballooned to nearly $2 million. It was likely aimed at solving no more than a handful of cases, and possibly just one.
Read more:NSA says phone location data poses a national security risk
It’s not certain where Babel Street obtains its data, who it’s sold to, and whether it honors opt-out requests in apps. Babel has declined to comment, even to Senator Ron Wyden when he pressed the company for answers. The Secret Service hasn’t responded toMotherboard‘s request for comment.
The outcry over location data sales has grown louder in recent years, particularly when word broke thatUS carriers were selling location datathat ultimately wound up in the hands of bounty hunters and others who weren’t expected to have it. The carriers have since halted those practices, but the Secret Service usage reflects a similar problem: government and law enforcement officials have been buying data to get location info they would normally need court approval to obtain.
That might change. Senator Wyden is promising a bill that would ban these purchases and force officials to obtain warrants and orders. For now, though, there’s not much you can do to avoid t these practices besides limiting location sharing in the apps you use.
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