California doesn't want ICE to know your location

Politico

13-03-2025

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QUICK FIX
— Sacramento Democrats latch onto privacy rules as another Trump resistance tactic.
— The kids' safety debate plays out in court — and exposes a fissure within Big Tech.
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Driving the day
ANALYSIS: THE GREAT FIREWALL — California Democrats have a new approach to resisting President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, beyond sanctuary cities and thwarting ICE raids: data protection.
State lawmakers' fear, shared by civil liberties groups, is that the Trump administration could leverage massive caches of location data and other online personal information gathered by advertisers, mobile apps and data brokers to aid mass deportations or target people seeking gender-affirming care.
They've authored a slate of bills this session to bolster the Golden State's already robust privacy laws, hoping to keep Trump at bay and closing any loopholes that could let sensitive information fall into his administration's hands.
'We've seen how location and digital data can be weaponized to target immigrant communities, protesters, and others whose identities or actions run counter to certain political agendas,' Assemblymember Chris Ward, a San Diego Democrat, told California Decoded in a statement.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta — who has emerged as a major player across blue states' Trump resistance — just this week announced his office is investigating businesses that appear to be breaking California's rules for protecting location data, citing concerns about federal immigration policies.
'This location data is deeply personal,' Bonta said in a statement Monday. 'Given the federal assaults on immigrant communities, as well as gender-affirming healthcare and abortion, businesses must take the responsibility to protect location data seriously.'
California immigrant rights groups have expressed similar concerns that data brokers sell personal information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without asking for user consent, citing past reports that ICE has extensive purchasing contracts with data analytics firms like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters.
'It really does seem like looking at technology and the use of information has been this sort of second frontier in terms of immigration enforcement,' said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center.
ICE earlier this week made its first arrest in a wider investigation aimed at identifying and deporting foreign students who appear to be 'pro-Hamas' — an effort the State Department has said will involve tracing attendance at anti-war protests, like the ones across California campuses. (ICE did not respond to requests for comment. A State Department spokesperson said they use all available technology in visa screening and vetting.)
'It's really easy to see how all-powerful tech tools and data collection by private businesses could be weaponized by a government who is willing to go that far in targeting American citizens,' Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of democracy watchdog nonprofit California Common Cause, said in an interview.
However, most people don't realize their devices and apps are sharing information about their precise location with third parties, state Sen. Josh Becker told Decoded.
'They're establishing a vast … surveillance network,' Becker, a forceful advocate for data privacy in the Legislature, said of the Trump administration. 'Certainly I think they're looking at all kinds of data sources. Data brokers could be one of them, and it's a source that people don't know.'
The Menlo Park Democrat is carrying a bill this year, SB 361, that would require data brokers to publicly disclose whether they collect and sell sensitive information like immigration status, sexual orientation, union membership and government ID numbers.
Becker has previously said his measure was 'especially necessary now as we see the reality of mass deportations of immigrants and the targeting of the transgender community.'
Another bill by Ward, AB 1355, would outright prohibit companies from selling location information to any third party, including federal agencies.
Ward in a statement told Decoded that Trump's deportation plans 'were not the primary reason for introducing' his bill but added that 'location data should never be sold to the highest bidder, especially when it can be used to surveil, intimidate, or punish people.' Stein called Ward's measure 'a really powerful solution' for protecting data from government overreach.
Meanwhile, Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan is still finalizing a placeholder bill, AB 45, that promises to beef up privacy protections for patients seeking an abortion. Her measure includes a ban on 'geofencing,' a device location tracking technology used by some data brokers that can identify when people enter and exit abortion clinics.
Bauer-Kahan didn't respond to a request for comment. She told POLITICO late last year that California needed more privacy safeguards for abortion patients in case Trump or Republicans in Congress passed laws restricting interstate abortion access.
In the Courts
CONTENT MODERATION — Judge Edward J. Davila for the U.S. District Court of Northern California just heard arguments today in NetChoice v. Bonta, a case brought by the tech industry group against a California law meant to offer parents more control over 'addictive' social media content.
Davila already paused the law from taking effect back in January but said NetChoice failed to show the entire law violates the First Amendment. His ruling will determine if the District Court continues proceedings in the case or waits for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to make a final decision on whether other portions of the law infringe on free speech rights.
Artificial Intelligence
WHAT'S MY AGE AGAIN — It's not unusual for Big Tech to take shots at bills it doesn't like. What's less common is for Big Tech to take shots at well, Big Tech, over a piece of legislation.
That is about the size of a shot Google fired at rival Meta on Wednesday over an age verification bill backed by the social media company in Utah, of all places, that would require an app store to tell app developers if a user is a child or a teenager.
It's the latest front in a national battle to decide how to keep kids safe online — including in the case heard today in court over California's law against 'addictive' feeds authored by former state Sen. Nancy Skinner. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks is similarly awaiting the legal fate of her 2022 Age Appropriate Design Code, which largely prohibits apps and sites likely to be accessed by children from targeting and tracking young people for commercial purposes, and limits the sharing of their data, among other provisions.
The Google-Meta spat shows the political fault lines are not just between companies and legislators, but also among the companies themselves and their differing profit motives, when it comes to the ongoing debate about how kids should be protected online.
'This level of data sharing isn't necessary — a weather app doesn't need to know if a user is a kid,' the post from Google's Director of Public Policy Kareem Ghanem said, brushing off the Utah proposal. Instead, he proposed a legal framework where data is only shared with consent, not by default.
Google runs the Android app store, so data sharing issues aside, it's not surprising the search giant wants to avoid having to handle that kind of sensitive information and the risks that come with it.
Meta has no app store to speak of, and is concerned with selling laser-targeted ads as well as skirting around sticky issues of online age verification.
'Parents across the country are calling for app stores to do more to keep children safe online, and fourteen US states and federal lawmakers have introduced legislation that responds to their concerns,' Meta spokesperson Stephanie Otway said in a statement to California Decoded.
The company has also rolled out Instagram teen accounts with more default privacy settings, and would rather parents be in control of their kids' social media use. Laws in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere also give parents control over how and how much their children use social media.
Otway painted Google's statement as an admission that the company can indeed share age data with app developers, adding: 'The simplest way to protect teens online is to put parents in charge. That's why legislation should require app stores to obtain parental consent before allowing children to download apps.'
But splits in the tech family are often an exception, not a rule.
Tech industry group NetChoice, which counts Google and Meta as members, is the one that sued over Wicks' Age Appropriate Design Code. A federal appeals court partially blocked that law while allowing some of its provisions to take effect, and the case is ongoing.
NetChoice is also the tech industry's chosen champion for the case that was heard in federal court today, challenging the Skinner law that outlaws providing addictive social media feeds to kids in California.
Byte Sized
— Intel surges nearly 15 percent after appointing chip industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan as CEO (Reuters)
— Meta plans to use X's technology to test community notes on Instagram and Facebook in the U.S. starting next week (NBC)
— OpenAI alleges Chinese competitor DeepSeek is 'state-controlled' (TechCrunch)
Have a tip, event or quality social media rant to share?? Do reach out: Emma Anderson, California tech editor; Chase DiFeliciantonio, AI and automation reporter; and Tyler Katzenberger, Sacramento tech reporter.