CBP issues privacy impact assessment for past commercial telemetry data usage
Customs and Border Protection confirmed in a privacy review published earlier this month that it was no longer collecting telemetry data, or smartphone location data, provided by commercial firms.
“CBP no longer collects commercial telemetry data owned and maintained by commercial vendors, though it continues to use the commercial telemetry data retained from its past use of vendors,” the privacy impact assessment states. The document is meant to provide a privacy review for that past activity, as well as an analysis of any privacy impacts created by the data collected during that period.
The agency said that during the evaluation period from December 2018 to September 2023, only a small number of “approved” CBP users were able to use smart phone location data and that cell phone geolocation data was not collected in bulk. CBP emphasized that this kind of information was only collected to “conduct law enforcement and national security queries of this commercially-owned data in furtherance of CBP mission sets.” Employees using this system were required to review and sign rules of behavior, the impact assessment noted.
The report comes nearly a year after the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released a report highlighting major concerns with the agency component’s approach to commercial telemetry data and privacy regulations.
In January, FedScoop reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had stopped using smart phone location data. The agency then said later that a privacy impact assessment related to the technology, and filed by the agency, was still in review.
