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Brennan Center — Closing the Data Broker Loophole
retrieved 2026-07-11
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Closing the Data Broker Loophole
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Closing the Data Broker Loophole
Congress must pass legislation that prohibits government agencies from buying their way around the Fourth Amendment and other legal privacy protections.
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Emile Ayoub
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Elizabeth Goitein
Published
February 13, 2024
Government Power
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Preface
Americans leave a trail of personal data with almost every action we take — every website visit, credit card payment, browser search, and online message generates data. Third parties like cell phone companies, internet service providers, social media platforms, and app developers collect and hold this information, often without our knowledge, and use it to offer tailored products and more personalized recommendations. This data also finds its way into exhaustive dossiers, compiled by data brokers, that reveal the most intimate details of our lives: our movements, habits, associations, health conditions, and ideologies.
Fourth Amendment case law and privacy-related legislation have failed to keep up with this proliferation of data. The lack of comprehensive data protection in the United States and a reliance on “notice and consent” privacy regimes have fostered an age of surveillance capitalism, enabling a shadow digital economy of platforms and third-party data brokers that collect and commodify users’ data. This underregulated data broker ecosystem, built to target consumers with ads, also engenders ever-increasing risks of data breaches; discrimination in housing, employment, and credit decisions; and dragnet surveillance by government agencies that can acquire vast amounts of personal information without legal process.
While all these risks demand action, the government’s ability to obtain troves of information about Americans from private-sector data brokers — including information that the government would otherwise need a warrant, court order, or subpoena to obtain — raises unique concerns. Unlike private entities, government agencies may purchase personal data to further their exercise of coercive powers, including the ability to deport, arrest, incarcerate, or even use lethal force.
Unfettered government access to personal data without judicial or legislative oversight can exacerbate existing biases in law enforcement and intelligence practices, permitting speculative investigations on the basis of constitutionally protected categories and the targeting of marginalized communities. Evidence of this phenomenon abounds, from the Defense Department purchasing location data collected from prayer apps to monitor Muslim communities to police departments purchasing information to track racial justice protesters. As state governments continue to pass strict anti-abortion legislation — laws that disproportionately harm women of color — such misuses will only expand. And as President Biden’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence acknowledges, the integration of new AI tools will make it easier to “extract, re-identify, link, infer, and act on sensitive information about people’s identities, locations, habits, and desires,” amplifying the risks to Americans’ privacy and freedoms of speech and association.