The Secret Service never actually checked whether people gave proper consent to be tracked by a mobile phone location monitoring tool, despite claiming the data was collected with peoples’ permission, the agency admitted in an email obtained by 404 Media.
The email undermines the Secret Service’s and other U.S. federal agencies' justification that monitoring the movements of phones with commercially available location data without a warrant is possible because people allegedly agreed to the terms of services of ordinary apps that may collect it. The news also comes after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banned Venntel, the company that provided the underlying dataset for the surveillance tool used by the Secret Service, from selling sensitive location data, and alleged that it did not obtain that consent in multiple cases. The tool used by the Secret Service is called Locate X, which is made by a company called Babel Street.
In the 2022 email, the office of Senator Ron Wyden asked the Secret Service what steps it had taken to verify that the location data it purchased from Babel Street was obtained from consumers who consented to “the onwards sale and sharing of the data.” Venntel collates location data from a variety of sources, including apps installed on peoples’ phones such as weather or navigation tools. The Secret Service’s one word response to that question read “None,” according to a copy of the email Wyden’s office shared with 404 Media.