John Z Black
Brunswick, ME • (207) 245-1010 • contact@johnzblack.com
When you tapped “Allow” on that location permission, you probably thought you were sharing your position with an app. You may have also been consenting to a surveillance system used by ICE, the US military, and police departments across the country. No warrant. No judge.
That’s Webloc. It’s built by Cobwebs Technologies, ingests mobile advertising data from up to 500 million devices, and makes three years of location history searchable. Confirmed customers include ICE, DHS, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and police in Los Angeles, Dallas, Baltimore, Tucson, and several other cities. Hungarian domestic intelligence has been a customer since at least 2022.
Purchasing commercial data isn’t a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. So none of this requires a warrant. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling established limits on cell-site data. This uses advertising data instead. Different legal category. Same result.
The fix is partial but real. On iPhone: Settings, Privacy, Tracking, turn it off. On Android: disable ad personalization in your Google account. It won’t eliminate your exposure, but it cuts off the most direct pipeline.
The longer fix requires Congress to update privacy law for an era of continuous behavioral data collection. That’s moving slowly.
Who’s buying your location data, what they can see, and what you can actually do about it