A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Thursday to ban the government from warrantless purchases of location data and other personal information used to track people.
‘The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,’ introduced by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, along with 18 other senators, would force the police to obtain a court order before purchasing people’s personal information through third-party data brokers, which often deceptively bundle and sell user photos and other personal data from smartphone apps, social media, and other sources.
“Doing business online doesn’t amount to giving the government permission to track your every movement or rifle through the most personal details of your life,” Wyden said in a statement. “There’s no reason information scavenged by data brokers should be treated differently than the same data held by your phone company or email provider. This bill closes that legal loophole and ensures that the government can’t use its credit card to end-run the Fourth Amendment.”
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The bill focuses on data brokers that scrape and often times steal social media data to sell. The bill bans the police and government agencies from buying “illegitimately obtained information,” including information that was gathered deceptively through hacking or violations of a platform’s privacy policy or terms of service.
The legislation would specifically stop the purchase of facial recognition services from companies such as Clearview AI, which gathers millions of photographs from users posted on social media.
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“Clearview AI uses these illicitly obtained photos to power a facial recognition service it sells to government agencies, which they can search without a court order,” a press release for the bill said.
