ICE takes aim at data held by advertising and tech firms • The Register
It’s not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission.
The RFI is not a solicitation for bids. Rather it represents an attempt to conduct market research into the spectrum of data – personal, financial, location, health, and so on – that ICE investigators can source from technology and advertising companies.
“[T]he Government is seeking to understand the current state of Ad Tech compliant and location data services available to federal investigative and operational entities, considering regulatory constraints and privacy expectations of support investigations activities,” the RFI explains.
Issued on Friday, January 23, 2026, one day prior to the shooting of VA nurse Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent, two weeks after the shooting of Renée Good, and three weeks after the shooting of Keith Porter Jr, the RFI lands amid growing disapproval of ICE tactics and mounting pressure to withhold funding for the agency.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request to elaborate on how it might use ad tech data and to share whether any companies have responded to its invitation.
The RFI follows a similar solicitation published last October for a contractor capable of providing ICE with open source intelligence and social media information to assist the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate’s Targeting Operations Division – tasked with finding and removing “aliens that pose a threat to public safety or national security.”
The October 2025 RFI observes that a new approach is needed because enforcement actions undertaken without open source intelligence and social media info often fail.
“Previous approaches to targeting individuals for enforcement action which have not incorporated open web sources and social media information have had limited success,” the RFI-Performance Work Statement says. “The individuals targeted for enforcement action purposely employ countermeasures to inhibit ICE-ERO’s ability to locate them.”
Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Register in a phone interview that the RFI represents “a preview of what’s to come. We know they’ve used a lot of this technology in the past, but what they’re trying to do is get a clearer state of the current environment for this technology.”
Maass said it’s not obvious which companies will respond to the inquiry. “It might not be the big companies you think of. It might be smaller consultancies. It might be resellers.”
He added that the information being sought is vague. The main focus, he expects, is location data from vendors like Venntel. But it could come from other sources, he said, like Thomson Reuters or Transunion’s TLOxp.
Tom Bowman, policy counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology’s (CDT) Security & Surveillance Project, told The Register in a phone interview that ICE is attempting to rebrand surveillance as a commercial transaction.
“But that doesn’t make the surveillance any less intrusive or any less constitutionally suspect,” said Bowman. “This inquiry specifically underscores what really is a long-standing problem – that government agencies have been able to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections by purchasing data that would otherwise need a warrant to collect.”
The data derived from ad tech and various technology businesses, said Bowman, can reveal intimate details about people’s lives, including visits to medical facilities and places of worship.
“Treating this data as merely commercially available is an end run around constitutional safeguards that erodes public trust,” he said.
Bowman said that while he expects DHS would justify its interest in this information by claiming it would make investigations more efficient, or that the information is already legally available, or that data providers abide by privacy rules, “administrative convenience has never been a valid excuse for bypassing civil liberties.”
Nor, he said, is paper compliance a cure for the abusive data pipeline.
“Ad tech compliance regimes were never designed to protect people from government surveillance or coercive enforcement,” he said. “Ad tech data is often collected via consent that is meaningless. The data flows are opaque. And then these types of downstream uses are really difficult to control.”
Bowman argues that while there’s been a broad failure to meaningfully regulate data brokers, legislative solutions are possible.
“Legislative solutions like the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would severely curb this type of shady surveillance behavior in which the government is able to rebrand surveillance via commercial transaction to sidestep the Fourth Amendment,” he said.
Maass said the EFF also supports legislation like the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. And he said that there are technical measures people can take to defend themselves, like disabling your advertising identifier on your phone and not sharing your location with apps that don’t need it.
But, he said, it has become harder to understand all the ways one can leak location data, pointing to the data gathering that occurs in modern cars.
Nick Doty, senior technologist at the CDT, also said individuals can take steps to reduce their data footprint by doing things like blocking cross-context tracking and withholding permission for location tracking in apps. He added that operating system vendors, browser makers, and ad tech companies could limit harmful tracking if they were incentivized to do so.
“If they want to protect users, I think there are also ways they could design [their products] that would enable efficient and effective advertising that didn’t require unique identifiers everywhere that you went,” Doty said.
We note that Google spent many years designing its failed “Privacy Sandbox” to limit the availability of data to advertisers, only to be out-lobbied by ad tech competitors who feared being put at a data disadvantage and preferred the status quo. ®
