Yes, the Government Can Track Your Location – But Not Always Through Direct Spying

The Hidden World of Location Data

If you use a mobile phone with location services enabled, it's likely that your personal data—such as where you live, work, shop, go to church, see your doctor, and even where you traveled during the holidays—is being collected and potentially sold. This data is not only accessible to private companies but also to government agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The U.S. government doesn't need to collect this information directly because your mobile phone is already doing it for them.

Location data is often collected as part of an app’s intended function, such as for navigation or weather forecasts. However, more frequently, this data is gathered in the background without users even realizing it. As a privacy researcher who studies how people understand and make decisions about their data, I've seen firsthand how difficult it is for individuals to regain control over their personal information once they’ve given permission for an app or website to access their location data.

Why Mobile Phones Collect Location Data

Mobile phones collect location data for two main reasons: as a by-product of their normal operation and because they are required to do so by law.

One reason is that phones constantly scan for nearby cell towers to ensure quick connectivity when making calls or sending texts. This process involves connecting with multiple cell towers simultaneously, which allows for triangulation. Triangulation works by calculating a phone's location based on the intersection of the coverage areas (or "bubbles") of the towers it's connected to.

Additionally, since 2001, mobile carriers have been legally required to provide latitude and longitude information for phones used to call 911. This helps emergency responders locate callers more quickly. The "Today" show has provided an overview of how your phone reveals your movements and activities through this data.

How Location Data Ends Up Being Shared

When users allow websites and apps to access their location data, the software developers can share this information widely without seeking further permission. Sometimes, apps themselves do this directly through partnerships with data brokers. More commonly, apps that include advertisements share location data via a process known as "real-time bidding." This process determines which ads are shown to users based on their profiles.

During real-time bidding, third-party advertisers place automated bids on ad space to target specific audiences. These third parties receive user data, including location, from the app or website, and they can then use this information however they choose. This includes selling the data to location data brokers, regardless of whether their bid wins the auction for the ad space.

What Happens to the Data Once It Is Shared

Once location data is acquired by data brokers, it is often sold widely. Some companies repackage this data and sell access to tools that monitor people's locations. These tools can be used for various purposes, such as providing roadside assistance, but they can also be utilized by police departments, government agencies, and others to track individuals.

In October 2025, news outlets reported that ICE had purchased a location surveillance tool from a company called Penlink. This tool can track the movements of specific mobile devices over time in a given location. Such tools allow users to access location data from "hundreds of millions of mobile phones" without a warrant.

Why This Matters

The invisible collection, sale, and repackaging of location data is a serious issue because this type of data is extremely sensitive and cannot be made anonymous. The two most common locations a person visits are their home and workplace. From this information alone, it is easy to determine a person's identity and match it with other data that these companies may have acquired.

Most people don't realize that the location data they allowed apps and services to collect for one purpose—like navigation or weather—can reveal sensitive personal information they may not want to be sold to data brokers. For example, a study I published about fitness tracker data found that while people use location data to track their exercise routes, they didn’t consider how this data could be used to infer their home address.

This lack of awareness means that people can't be expected to anticipate that data collected through the normal use of their mobile phones might be available to entities like ICE.

The Need for Greater Regulation

More restrictions on how mobile phone carriers and apps collect and share location data—and how the government obtains and uses this information—could help protect individual privacy. So far, efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to curb carriers' data sales have had mixed results in federal court, and only a few states are attempting to pass legislation to address this growing concern.