So I’ve just been thinking about privacy, and how everyone’s location can be tracked. Then I realized: What about people who have no permission to enter the country?
Like do they just decide to not have a phone, or do they still have phones and just roll the dice and hope they don’t get caught?
There’s a few things here.
The government doesn’t actually know who’s illegal or legal unless they specifically check a physical person. It’s not like they maintain a list of “illegal” people. Your name gets recorded when you enter the country legally, but it’s not recorded when you leave. If you fail to leave, they don’t really know until they find you and match you to the entry. If you entered illegally, there’s no record at all.
Second, You could easily use a fake ID or fake identity to get a cellphone and the carriers wouldn’t give a shit as long as the bill gets paid. It doesn’t even have to be under your name, maybe it’s under your friend’s account.
Third, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, but you don’t need a “cell” phone to have a phone. A lot of poor people just have a device that can connect to WIFI, and make calls through an app or just message.
Some carriers specifically cater to unbanked people.
When I worked at Radio Shack back in the day, Sprint had a card you could just hand to the cashier with cash. Didn’t even need to speak any English. The card had all your details on it.
Of course they charged a $5 fee per transaction because fuck poor people.
You don’t talk to US customs on your way out via land borders.
If you fly out, there would be a flight record, but most of the other methods don’t get recorded. If you go to Canada, the canadian immigration shares that data with the US, assuming you use the same passport (some people have more than one)
If you go to Mexico though, there’s no record and the Mexican government doesn’t share that info with the US. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47541 Page 14
It depends. Physical borders may only photograph traffic for security purposes, no dedicated exit gate. Usually its the entry country that records your crossing, which they may or may not share with the other country.
I’m pretty sure TSA does record people exiting internationally though because people have been caught leaving after an arrest warrant has been issued, even if they made it past TSA onto the flight and into the air. TSA will know immediately if you checked in or boarded your flight.
You can buy a prepay phone at Walmart or similar, then just buy cards to add airtime. You don’t have to register your name anywhere. I had one like that for years.
They might know where a phone is, but not if it belongs to a ‘legal’ person or not.
I get what you are saying, but there is a pretty big difference between “undocumented immigrant” and “the authorities are actively looking for you.” Also, it’s pretty easy to enter alias information into a phone so you can use it without announcing that it belongs to you.
Accessing that location data isn’t trivial. The data is typically held by various private companies who put up at least token legal resistance to cover themselves from lawsuits.
Intelligence agencies have their own avenue for getting the data, and on paper they’re not allowed to share it with police agencies.
Police agencies typically need to specify the individual in question, or the specific location and time to get a warrant. This is because they’re not supposed to be able to blanket surveil an otherwise private piece of information without having a good reason.
The classic example is not being able to listen to every call on a payphone they know drug dealers use because they’ll listen to people who have not done anything illegal.
Intelligence agencies are an entirely different thing with weird special rules and minimal and strange oversight.
This is all relevant because the government doesn’t actually know who’s allowed to be here or not.
Most people in the country without proper documentation entered legally and then just stayed outside the terms of their entry. The terms can be difficult to verify remotely, which is why you’re not actually here illegally until you go in front of a judge, they deport you, and then you return again.
Finally, there are significant chunks of the country where location tracking via cell tower is imprecise enough to get the country wrong, and a lot of people live there. So any dragnet surveillance setup is going to have to exclude some pretty large population centers to avoid constantly investigating people in Windsor sometimes quickly teleporting into Detroit.
I disagree. Location data is trivial to obtain. I worked for a data broker and the company just buys location data from telecom companies. They werent allowed to disclose location and times, but they could use the data to verify a person’s work address and home address easily.
But you probably received the data anonymized, i.e. you had a code that meant a person, and you could track information on that person, but you couldn’t immediately know who that person was.
Otherwise that company, and whoever sold it its data, are in for a BIG lawsuit from any EU citizen you track. And you might say “who cares, my company didn’t act in the EU”, but whoever sold you the data certainly does, and they would get sued and fined very heavily, so it’s unlikely they would not anonymize the data before selling it.
