ICE reportedly wants to buy the same data that advertisers use to show you diaper ads when you’re pregnant—except they want to use it to track and deport people.
The agency quietly published a request for information in the Federal Register last week, asking ad tech companies to help them harness commercial surveillance data for “investigative activities.” Translation: the infrastructure built to sell you stuff is about to become a deportation machine.
WHAT’S GOING ON: ICE says it’s “gathering information to better understand how the industry’s commercial Big Data and ad tech providers can directly support investigations activities.” They want “Ad Tech compliant” location data and behavioral targeting capabilities—the exact tools that track where you go, what you search, and what you do when you’re scared.
As Jess Lewis, an ad tech veteran who’s spent nearly two decades building these systems, explained on Threads: this data reveals where you physically go (work, home, church, clinic, school), what you search for (“immigration lawyer,” “know your rights,” “deportation defense”), your behavioral patterns, and your social connections and networks.
Here’s the terrifying part: this data was never designed for law enforcement. Lewis notes that identity matching in commercial ad tech has 30-40% error rates. That’s fine for showing you the wrong sneaker ad. It’s catastrophic when ICE uses it to kick down someone’s door.
BUT BUT BUT: This isn’t happening in isolation. CNN reported this week that federal agents in Minneapolis received a memo asking them to collect identifying information on protesters—license plates, hotel information, anything they can get—using a form titled “intel collection non-arrests.”
Among the likely surveillance targets? Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse killed by Customs and Border Protection agents in broad daylight. Days before his death, federal agents beat him so badly he suffered a broken rib. Sources told CNN that agents already knew his name.
A masked ICE agent in Portland, Maine, recently warned a woman filming their activities that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” labeling her a domestic terrorist. Federal agents have started making house calls on volunteer ICE watchers to intimidate them.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin—a well-documented liar—claimed this is “standard protocol” for “violent agitators.” But the pattern is clear: filming cops is now obstruction, monitoring ICE is terrorism, and your phone’s location data is the evidence.
WHY IT MATTERS: “It is a really troubling distillation of the alignment between commercial surveillance and state surveillance that has been growing for a long time now,” John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told MediaPost.
ICE already has deals with facial recognition companies and reportedly uses Palantir to find home addresses of people they want to deport. This request signals they want to go even deeper into the surveillance capitalism pipeline.
The House passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act last year, which would require court orders before agencies can buy personal data from brokers. It’s stalled in the Senate.
BOTTOM LINE: The tech industry spent years normalizing the idea that your every move should be tracked to sell you products. Now that infrastructure is being weaponized against immigrants, protesters, and anyone who dares document what federal agents are doing. Lewis’s message to ad tech workers considering bidding on this contract: “This data WILL result in wrongful detention. You WILL be complicit.”