this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.

Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.

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[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 73 points 1 day ago (3 children)

FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE's rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it's paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

[–] mmmac@lemmy.zip 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Both of these sources seem like things that would be blocked by using a DNS sinkhole. I personally use technetium but pihole and adguard are more popular, but less feature rich and harder to set up as a recursive resolver.

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 1 points 14 hours ago

If they want to target more technologically capable users, they'll just hard code the IP addresses so it doesn't need DNS and make any IP changes in routine updates.

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 37 points 1 day ago (6 children)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ukgd0gIWd9gpV6bOx2pcSHsVO6yIUqbjnlM4ewjO6Cs/edit?usp=sharing&ref=404media.co

This is the link to the full list provided in that article but it may also be paywalled by 404 Media which I am a subscriber to. It's also got more than ~~1K~~ 10K entries on it.

A lot of these seem to be mobile games, fitness apps, photo editing apps, and prayer apps though.

[–] plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

In case you're wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

[–] SlippiHUD@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

My SMS app was on it. Which makes me sad because Textra was dope, I've moved to qksms.

[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it...

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah. Typo. Seems to happen a lot when I'm typing fast on a phone screen. Sorry.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

These are all presumably Android apps. Is there a list for IOS apps?

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

404Media say that their list is a comprehensive list of both Android and iOS apps. So no as far as I know that is the list.

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago

And, added it to the description.

[–] DBT@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Not paywalled.