In a privacy review published earlier this month, Customs and Border Protection confirmed that it does not collect telemetry data, namely smartphone location data, provided by private companies.
“Although CBP no longer collects commercial telemetry data owned and controlled by commercial vendors, it will continue to use commercial telemetry data it maintained with vendors in the past,” the Privacy Impact Assessment states. The document is intended to provide a privacy review of past activities and an analysis of the privacy impacts resulting from data collected during that period.
The agency said that during the evaluation period, which ran from December 2018 to September 2023, only a small number of “authorized” CBP users had access to smartphone location data, and no bulk cell phone location data was collected. CBP emphasized that this type of information was collected only to “conduct law enforcement and national security inquiries into this commercially-proprietary data in furtherance of CBP’s mission set.” Employees using the system were required to review and sign rules of conduct, the impact assessment noted.
The report comes nearly a year after the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released a report that highlighted major concerns about the department’s approach to commercial telemetry data and privacy regulations.
In January, FedScoop reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had halted its use of smartphone location data. The agency later said that a privacy impact assessment it had submitted related to the technology was still under review.
