U.S. Border Patrol Bought 'Unlimited' Use of a Nationwide Tracking Database

vice.com

40 points·danso··4 comments

Every person, living and dead, is tracked in realtime, in astonishing detail.

We should daylight these activities and normalize it. Privacy protections would be nice, for instance. The Wild West days of these data aggregators needs to be over.

Further, other policy assumptions need to be revisited. Continued debate over our census process and voter registration databases is silly. Just run some queries.

> more insight into CBP's nationwide tracking database, which it purchased access to from a commercial vendor called Vigilant.

I can understand, sort of, why a 3-letter agency might want to have access to vehicle tracking; but why does some commercial entity have this information in the first place? Some corp is silently collecting location data on everyone (how? Buying it from phone and CCTV operators?), and everyone is ok with this? US needs GDPR, stat

https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/about/privacy-policy...

It seems they're mostly license plate reading. Acquired by Motorola. This page for california residents is interesting in that it doesn't seem to have anything about the vehicle tracking in it's "Do not sell my personal information" page.

Anyone in CA want to ask them what they have?

Is it possible companies are fine selling your vehicle's data with no recourse and claiming its not "personal" data because it's data about a car?

CBP having access to this is bad for it's own reasons, but what is equally bad is a private company tracking movement of individuals without their informed consent.

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