The Device We Trust
Our phones are how we navigate the world. Not metaphorically — literally. We open Waze or Google Maps to get to work. We check our bank balance at the grocery store. We text our kid’s teacher. We call 911 in an emergency. We use it for two-factor authentication on every account we own.
It’s our alarm clock, our camera, our wallet, our calendar, our medical records, our GPS. We carry it into the bathroom. We sleep next to it. It’s the most intimate device we own — more personal than our car, our computer, or anything else in our house.
And we trust it. We have to. Modern life doesn’t work without it. Try getting through a week without a phone — no maps, no banking app, no text messages, no boarding passes. We 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 we’re using our phones for directions and bank deposits, our phone is doing something else entirely. It’s reporting on us. Constantly.
Our phones log our location hundreds of times a day. They record which Wi-Fi networks we pass. They note how long we stay at the doctor’s office, the gun store, the church, the bar. They track which apps we open, when we open them, and for how long. Even when we think it’s idle, it’s pinging cell towers and reporting our coordinates.
Waze — the navigation app millions of Americans rely on — is owned by Google. Every trip we take feeds Google’s advertising profile on us. 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. Our route to the pharmacy, our visit to a protest, our stop at a family planning clinic. All logged. All sold. All available to whoever pays.
Apps we downloaded years ago and forgot about are still running in the background. They’re harvesting our contacts, scanning our photo library for metadata, tracking our location even when we’re not using them. A calculator app doesn’t need our location. A QR code scanner doesn’t need our contacts. A shopping app doesn’t need our microphone. But they ask, and most of us tap “Allow” because the alternative is the app won’t work.
Apps harvest our contacts, photos, and location in the background — even when we’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 our 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 our data. No obligation to tell us our information was sold. No right to see what they have on us. No right to delete it. The data broker industry generates billions of dollars a year, and the product is us.
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.
Waze is owned by Google. I’ve actually used Google Maps Timeline to log my mileage for tax write-offs — it records every trip, every stop, every timestamp. I went to timeline.google.com and it showed me every place I’d been. It was useful, until the moment it hit me that Google knows more about my daily life than the people closest to me. (I made sure that link is not clickable from this page. If you want to see what Google knows about you, copy it into a new tab and press enter.)
That’s not a real choice. That’s a hostage negotiation dressed up as a feature. The problem isn’t the app. The problem is what happens to our data after the app does its job. We asked for directions to the airport. We 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. We should be able to use great software without paying for it with our civil liberties.
What Real Privacy Looks Like
Our phones can be smart without being spies. We need federal rules that put us back in control of what our devices share 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 our movements, we 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 our 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 our data to the cloud. On-device AI can process our photos, our messages, our 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. For those who want more from AI and understand the trade-offs, the choice to use it fully should be there. The point is choice, not restriction.
None of this means giving up our phones or the apps we rely on. It means building a legal framework where the device in our pocket works for us — not for a data broker we’ve never heard of. We already carry our whole life in that phone. We shouldn’t have to hand our whole life over to use it.