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Your Phone Is Selling You.

The Government Is Buying.

Your Phone Is Selling You.

TLDR: It's time to apply the pressure on Congress to reform FISA Section 702. Even if we are successful, the core data harvesting problem still remains. Unplugged's UP Phone solves this. 

Most of us carry our phones everywhere. We don’t want to be tracked, and deep down, we feel violated when we know it is happening. We go to work, to church and to the kids’ soccer game. We visit our doctors about things we would never willingly choose to share with friends and neighbors. Yet, this location data and a massive trove of other data including search histories, AI chats and device telemetry can easily end up in a government database.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the U.S. or a foreign government does not need to break into your phone to know exactly where you have been. It just buys the data legally and without a warrant. From the same data brokers that your apps have been quietly feeding for years. 

This isn't a theory, and it takes place regardless of which party is in power. 

Current Status of FISA Section 702 and Why It Matters to You

FISA Section 702 is a surveillance law which was set to expire on April 20th. In a last-minute maneuver, Congress voted for a 10-day extension on Friday, April 17th, to give privacy-minded members more time to negotiate and to come up with checks and balances.  
 
The debate around renewing it has exposed something most Americans did not know existed: a loophole that allows federal agencies (FBI, ICE, IRS, DOD) to purchase smartphone and online data from commercial data brokers without ever going to a judge.

This isn’t about intercepting your calls or breaking into your device. They are simply buying what your apps already collected and sold.

A coalition of more than 130 civil society organizations called this an unprecedented expansion of warrantless mass surveillance.

At a Senate hearing on March 18th, FBI Director Kash Patel was asked directly whether he would commit to not purchasing Americans' location data. He declined, stating the FBI "uses all tools."

It isn’t a partisan issue. The reform bill to close this loophole, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, has bipartisan support from both Republican and Democratic senators and representatives, but there are also many on both sides of the aisle who want the government to maintain all the power it can get. 

President Trump even wrote a lengthy post on Truth Social saying he is willing to give up his freedom, and you should be willing to do so as well.

“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!”

Sorry Mr. President. Speak for yourself. We aren’t with you on this one.  
 
When Congress voted late last week for a 10-day extension, it opened a rare window for real reform. 

From the NY Times:  

“Privacy-minded lawmakers want to require a court order to access information about and the private messages of Americans swept up in the program. They have also proposed using the bill to bar the government from purchasing data about Americans from data brokers if it would need a warrant to collect the information directly.”

Here Is What Most People Are Missing

A large part of the debate in Washington has focused on whether the FBI and other agencies are doing something unconstitutional. We are way past that. The privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment are hanging by a thread. That is the wrong question.

Mike Yeagley, who spent years teaching US intelligence agencies how to use commercial phone data to locate and track targets around the world recently made a pointed observation: the FBI is not the sophisticated actor in this story. The Bureau is years behind the commercial data innovation cycle. They are bureaucratic, disorganized, and struggling to use the data effectively. (Mike Yeagley now advises and supports Unplugged.) 

The real issue is that this data is available to anyone willing to pay for it, including foreign governments, private corporations, and bad actors. The commercial data ecosystem your phone feeds every day does not check credentials before selling.

Whether or not the FBI should be allowed to buy your data is only part of the problem. The real question is why your phone is generating and selling it in the first place.

AI Changes Everything

For years, location data was useful but imperfect. A list of coordinates without context has limits, and it required sophisticated, costly analysis. AI removes those limits entirely.

The CEO of Anthropic warned publicly that records available for purchase can now be used by AI to automatically assemble a comprehensive picture of any person's life (routines, relationships, health, beliefs) at a massive scale, with almost no human involvement required. What used to take weeks of manual analysis now takes seconds. Your phone's data, combined with AI, is no longer just an advertising tool. It is surveillance infrastructure available to anyone.

A Ray of Hope

Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) proposed a compromise bill titled the Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act, which is intended to preserve the core tool to gather foreign intelligence while enacting safeguards to protect Fourth Amendment rights. They co-wrote an opinion essay for the NY Times.  

“Our bill would also cut off another form of warrantless surveillance: the widespread practice of circumventing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing Americans’ sensitive information from data brokers.”

This is a welcome change. Of course, at Unplugged, we are unabashedly pro-privacy, and we would like to see this go much further, but this is moving in the right direction.

Your Phone Is the Source

Let’s game this out and assume Senators Lee and Durbin are successful in passing their compromise legislation. We hope they do. We encourage our readers and customers who live in the United States to call your senators and congressperson and weigh in if you feel strongly about preserving privacy and reforming FISA 702.  
 
However, the larger, technological problem still remains. If you are using a smartphone with the Google Android OS or an Apple device with iOS, then your device, the installed apps and the OS are collecting hundreds of thousands to millions of data points and device telemetry and sending it to hundreds of third-party servers every single day. Even the apps you like and authorize are overreaching, scooping up data completely irrelevant to their functionality.  

The FBI may lose a tool to get your data without a warrant (and rightfully so), but a quarter trillion dollar global industry is still awash in trading your most sensitive data.  

Only UP Phone solves this.

  • Unplugged builds the most powerful Firewall on the market to block third-party tracking.
  • Our UnpluggedOS is open source and built around a privacy-first paradigm.
  • We are not in the business of collecting troves of data to profile our customers.
  • We do not use AD-IDs.
  • We have a built-in VPN
  • Brave browser comes standard.

If you haven’t yet made the leap, we encourage you to try UP Phone. If you are one of our wonderful customers, share your experience with your friends and family. The more people who choose to break free from the clutches of ubiquitous surveillance, the more the people of the United States and the global population will come to value privacy again.