The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency. Commercially available information, or CAI, has grown in such scale that it has begun to replicate the results of intrusive surveillance techniques once used on a more targeted and limited basis, the report found. “In a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained” through targeted collection methods such as wiretaps, cyber espionage or physical surveillance, the report concluded. 

In recent years, data brokers’ offerings have grown from basic address history and demographic information to include the trail of information generated by smartphone devices and apps, social-media platforms, automobiles and location trackers such as fitness watches. Such detailed information can now “cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety,” said the report, which urged the intelligence community to develop better policies, procedures and safeguards around its acquisition of such information.  Virtually anyone can purchase the data, and the marketplace is loosely regulated in the U.S., which has no comprehensive national privacy law. 

Much of that data is sold to the government by vendors who claim it is “anonymized”—stripped of personal information such as names or addresses. But privacy advocates and researchers say that in the case of geolocation information on phones or cars, a name can often be inferred: Individuals typically park their cars at night and set down their phones at their homes. In the case of certain internet data, browsing behavior also can reveal personal information.

“If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance,” Wyden said in a statement, referring to the U.S. Constitution’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Excerpts from Byron Tau and Dustin Volz, U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, WSJ,, June 13, 2023