A recent article in The Guardian revealed that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) sent Google, Twitter and Meta up to 500 administrative subpoenas demanding their user’s sensitive personal information.
While these tech giants are not required by law to provide the information requested, many often do, often on a case-by-case basis.
The article acknowledges that the requests show “most demands were related to the agency’s immigration enforcement efforts. A handful of cases were related to human smuggling and one was part of a murder investigation.”
One’s own views on current immigration policy would likely determine whether one finds this practice acceptable or egregious. But here’s the problem: Just as with the Patriot Act that was instituted after the 9/11 attack, giving the government permission to monitor residents never limits itself to a few select targets.
Indeed, as one legal strategist observed, “When ICE gets subscriber data from Google or from Instagram they can combine that information with billions of other data points on hundreds of millions of US residents that they get access to from other companies.”
And when tech companies or law enforcement agencies do not cooperate with ICE, the agency has purchased user information from data brokers, who will gladly provide your home address, phone number and personal content, to anyone who asks, for a price, regardless of how that information is used.
So the question comes back to this: who owns your private data? We began providing online privacy protection more than a decade ago because we believe your private data belongs to you.
Google wants it, data brokers want it, and scammers want it, because they can use it to make money. And sometimes the government wants it as well, without any justification for that request.
What Can You Do?
Make it as difficult as possible for someone to find what belongs to you. Our IronWall360 online privacy protection service goes after data brokers and makes sure your personal information is removed from their databases. Yes, they’ll sometimes take it down for a while and then put it back up – that’s why we monitor their sites continuously, and keep after them until it stays off.
Since we began our IronWall360 online protection service, we have removed more than one million pieces of personal information for our clients.
Now we’re ready to go to work for you.
Learn How to Protect Yourself and Your Family
