The Device You Trust
Your phone is how you navigate the world. Not metaphorically — literally. You open Waze or Google Maps to get to work. You check your bank balance at the grocery store. You text your kid’s teacher. You call 911 in an emergency. You use it for two-factor authentication on every account you own.
It’s your alarm clock, your camera, your wallet, your calendar, your medical records, your GPS. You carry it into the bathroom. You sleep next to it. It’s the most intimate device you own — more personal than your car, your computer, or anything else in your house.
And you trust it. You have to. Modern life doesn’t work without it. Try getting through a week without your phone — no maps, no banking app, no text messages, no boarding passes. You can’t even pay for parking in most cities anymore without an app. The phone isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure.
What It’s Actually Doing
While you’re using your phone for directions and bank deposits, your phone is doing something else entirely. It’s reporting on you. Constantly.
Your phone logs your location hundreds of times a day. It records which Wi-Fi networks you pass. It notes how long you stay at the doctor’s office, the gun store, the church, the bar. It tracks which apps you open, when you open them, and for how long. Even when you think it’s idle, it’s pinging cell towers and reporting your coordinates.
Waze — the navigation app millions of Americans rely on — is owned by Google. Every trip you take feeds Google’s advertising profile on you. But it goes further than ads. Waze’s location data has been obtained by data brokers and made available to law enforcement agencies — without a warrant. Your route to the pharmacy, your visit to a protest, your stop at a family planning clinic. All logged. All sold. All available to whoever pays.
Apps you downloaded years ago and forgot about are still running in the background. They’re harvesting your contacts, scanning your photo library for metadata, tracking your location even when you’re not using them. A calculator app doesn’t need your location. A QR code scanner doesn’t need your contacts. A shopping app doesn’t need your microphone. But they ask, and most people tap “Allow” because the alternative is the app won’t work.
Apps harvest your contacts, photos, and location in the background — even when you’re not using them. That data flows to brokers who sell it to anyone willing to pay, including law enforcement agencies operating without warrants.
Who’s Profiting
There is an entire industry built on buying and selling your phone data. It operates in the open, and there is no federal law that stops it.
Data brokers — companies like Babel Street and Venntel and dozens of others — purchase raw location data from app developers and advertising networks. Babel Street repackages Venntel’s data through a product called Locate X and sells it to government agencies. They aggregate it, clean it, and resell it as detailed movement profiles. For a few thousand dollars, anyone can buy a dataset that shows exactly where a specific phone has been — day by day, hour by hour. Not “someone in this zip code.” This phone, this address, this route, this schedule.
Government agencies have used this marketplace to bypass the Fourth Amendment. Instead of getting a warrant to track someone’s location, they simply buy the data from a broker. The FBI, ICE, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security — they’ve all purchased commercial location data. It’s legal because no court has definitively ruled that buying data you could have gotten with a warrant counts as a search. The loophole is the business model.
There is no federal data broker regulation. None. No registration requirement. No transparency about who buys your data. No obligation to tell you your information was sold. No right to see what they have on you. No right to delete it. The data broker industry generates billions of dollars a year, and the product is you.
I use Waze. I understand why everyone does — it works. The crowd-sourced traffic data, the speed trap alerts, the rerouting around accidents. It’s genuinely useful technology. I’m not here to shame anyone for using apps that make their day easier.
The problem isn’t the app. The problem is what happens to your data after the app does its job. You asked for directions to the airport. You didn’t ask for that trip to be logged, packaged, and sold to a data broker in Virginia who then sells it to a government contractor in Washington. But that’s what happens. And right now, nothing in federal law prevents it.
I don’t want to take Waze away from anyone. I want to take the surveillance pipeline away from the brokers. You should be able to use great software without paying for it with your civil liberties.
What Real Privacy Looks Like
Your phone can be smart without being a spy. We need federal rules that put you back in control of what your device shares and with whom.
The Rules We Need
- Federal data broker regulation — require data brokers to register, disclose what data they hold, and obtain explicit consent before selling location data. No more shadow industry operating with zero oversight. If a company profits from selling your movements, you should know who they are, what they have, and how to make them delete it.
- Explicit consent for location data — apps should not collect location data in the background without a clear, ongoing, plain-English opt-in. Not a one-time “Allow” buried in a permissions screen at install. A recurring, visible reminder: “This app has tracked your location 847 times this month. Continue?” Let people see the scale of what they’re agreeing to.
- Close the warrant loophole — if the government needs a warrant to put a GPS tracker on your car, it should need a warrant to buy your GPS data from a broker. Purchasing what you can’t legally collect isn’t a workaround. It’s an end-run around the Constitution. Ban government agencies from purchasing commercial location data without judicial authorization.
- Local-first AI that processes on-device — the next generation of phone features doesn’t have to send your data to the cloud. On-device AI can process your photos, your messages, your voice commands without transmitting anything to a remote server. The technology exists today. Apple has started moving in this direction. Federal policy should incentivize on-device processing as the default for people who aren’t tech-savvy. If you’re someone who wants more from AI and understands the trade-offs, you should have the choice to use it fully. The point is choice, not restriction.
None of this means giving up your phone or the apps you rely on. It means building a legal framework where the device in your pocket works for you — not for a data broker you’ve never heard of. You already carry your whole life in that phone. You shouldn’t have to hand your whole life over to use it.