ICE Wants Your Ad Data: How Advertising Tech Became a Surveillance Pipeline

TL;DR: On January 23, 2026, ICE published a Request for Information on SAM.gov seeking "commercial Big Data and Ad Tech" products to "directly support investigations activities." Translation: ICE wants ad tech companies to hand over the location data your phone apps collect every time you open a weather app, check sports scores, or order food. This data (GPS coordinates accurate to within meters, tied to persistent device IDs) lets ICE track anyone with a smartphone. No warrant needed. Companies have until February 2 to respond.

The Request

The filing is designated "FY26_RFI-Big Data & Ad Tech." It appeared on SAM.gov (the federal contracting portal) on January 23, 2026. ICE wants to "understand the current state of Ad Tech compliant and location data services available to federal investigative and operational entities."

What they're shopping for:

Location data services: GPS coordinates from mobile advertising SDKs embedded in hundreds of thousands of apps
Behavioral and identity services: Purchase histories, browsing patterns, demographic profiles
Cross-device matching: Connecting anonymous advertising IDs to real people
Geofencing tools: Alerts when a device enters a defined area
Machine learning platforms: Predicting behavior from historical patterns

Responses are due February 2, 2026. ICE plans to invite selected companies for live demonstrations of their capabilities.

This is technically "market research," not a procurement. But the language makes the intent clear. ICE isn't browsing. They're building a shopping list.

How Your Phone Becomes a Tracking Device

Here's the pipeline ICE wants to tap into.

Every smartphone has an advertising ID, a unique identifier that tracks you across apps. When you open an app with embedded advertising code (which is most of them), that app sends your GPS coordinates, your ad ID, a timestamp, and other data to ad networks. Those networks sell access to data brokers. Those brokers sell to anyone who pays.

Including the federal government.

The data is staggeringly precise. GPS coordinates accurate to within meters. Persistent device identifiers that follow you across apps. Timestamps showing exactly when you were at a specific location. String enough data points together and you've got a complete picture of someone's life: where they sleep, where they work, where they worship, who they visit.

A WIRED investigation in November 2024 exposed how anyone could purchase more than 3 billion phone coordinates tracking the movements of US military and intelligence personnel in Germany, including routes to the US Army's European headquarters at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne ^[1]. If journalists can buy military location data, imagine what ICE can do with a $28.7 billion budget.

ICE Has Done This Before

This isn't ICE's first trip to the ad tech marketplace. They've been buying location data for years.

Venntel, a subsidiary of data broker Gravy Analytics, boasted it collected location data from over 250 million devices and processed 15 billion location points per day ^[2]. Customs and Border Protection spent over $2 million on Venntel contracts in 2019 and 2020. ICE used the data to identify and arrest immigrants.

Babel Street offers search access to the same data ecosystem. CBP renewed its Babel Street subscription for nearly $3 million in 2020. The Secret Service paid over $600,000 for a 12-month contract ^[3].

Pen-Link (Webloc) landed a $5 million ICE contract for phone tracking using mobile data broker feeds ^[4].

Now ICE is expanding the playbook. The January 2026 RFI doesn't name specific vendors. It asks the entire ad tech industry to pitch their surveillance capabilities. That's a signal: ICE wants more data, from more sources, with more features.

The Constitutional Loophole

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government needs a warrant to get cell phone location data from carriers. The logic: tracking someone's movements amounts to "near perfect surveillance" that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.

The government's workaround? Buy the same data from brokers instead.

When you install an app and tap "agree" on a privacy policy nobody reads, the government calls that "consent." Your location data flows from app to ad network to broker to ICE. No warrant. No judge. No probable cause. Just a purchase order.

"ICE is attempting to rebrand surveillance as a commercial transaction," Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told The Register ^[5]. "But that doesn't make the surveillance any less intrusive or any less constitutionally suspect."

Bowman pointed out that "ad tech compliance regimes were never designed to protect people from government surveillance or coercive enforcement." The consent model is a fiction. Nobody opens a weather app thinking their GPS coordinates will end up in an ICE investigation file.

The Scale of the Machine

This RFI lands in the middle of ICE's biggest surveillance buildout in history. The agency's FY2025 budget hit $28.7 billion, nearly triple the previous year ^[4]. For context, that makes ICE better funded than the militaries of most nations.

The ad tech push is one piece of a much larger apparatus:

$11 million to Cellebrite for phone-unlocking tools that extract encrypted messages
$10 million to Clearview AI for facial recognition
$5.7 million to Zignal Labs for AI that scans 8 billion social media posts daily
$5 million to Pen-Link for warrantless phone tracking
$4.2 million to Fivecast for dark web and social media monitoring
$3 million to Magnet Forensics for Graykey phone-cracking devices
$2 million to Paragon for Graphite spyware that reads Signal and WhatsApp messages
$30 million to Palantir for ImmigrationOS, linking IRS data, immigration records, and private databases

Ad tech data fills a specific gap in this arsenal: continuous, passive location tracking of everyone. No phone hack required. No facial recognition camera needed. Just the apps already on your phone.

Why This Gets Worse

The ad tech market is concentrated. The top 10 companies control 80.8% of revenue ^[1]. That means government access to a handful of platforms could expose location data for most smartphone users in the country.

And the data supply chain is nearly impossible to audit. Your fitness app sends data to an ad SDK. That SDK feeds data to an exchange. The exchange sells to a broker. The broker sells to a government contractor. Nobody along that chain asks why ICE wants to know where you went last Tuesday.

California fined one data broker, Datamasters, $45,000 for selling consumer lists organized by health conditions without proper registration. That's the exception, not the rule. Most of this market operates with minimal oversight.

Cut the Pipeline

Reset Your Advertising ID

iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking > disable "Allow Apps to Request to Track." Also: Settings > Privacy > Apple Advertising > disable Personalized Ads.
Android: Settings > Privacy > Ads > Delete advertising ID. On newer versions, you can opt out entirely.

Kill Location Access

Review every app's location permission. Most don't need it. Set to "Never" or "While Using," never "Always." Weather apps, games, shopping apps, and social media do not need your GPS coordinates in the background.

Audit Your Apps

Free apps are the worst offenders: they make money by selling your data. Delete apps you don't actively use. Check permissions for the ones you keep. Consider paid alternatives that don't rely on ad revenue.

Use a VPN

A VPN masks your IP address but won't stop GPS tracking from apps. Combine it with disabled location permissions for better protection. Avoid free VPNs: they sell your data too.

Support Legislative Action

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden, would require the government to get a warrant before buying location data from brokers ^[6]. It hasn't passed. Contact your representatives.

Use California's DROP System

If you're in California, the new DELETE Act launched the DROP platform on January 1, 2026. One request tells every registered data broker to delete your data. Other states should follow California's lead.

The Bottom Line

ICE isn't hiding what it's doing. The RFI is public. The intent is explicit. They want to buy the location data that ad tech companies collect through your phone apps and use it to track people for immigration enforcement.

The Supreme Court said warrantless location tracking violates the Fourth Amendment. The government's response: find someone else to do the tracking, then buy the results.

Every time you open an app without checking its permissions, you're potentially feeding coordinates into an enforcement database. The ad tech industry built the surveillance infrastructure. ICE just wants the keys.