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13/11/2025

Google is hosting a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials.

ICE-spotting app developers tell 404 Media the decision to host CBP’s new app, and Google’s description of ICE officials as a vulnerable group in need of protection, shows that Google has made a choice on which side to support during the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation effort.

Google’s decision to host CBP’s immigrant-hunting app while removing one designed to warn people about the presence of ICE has concerned free speech experts.
“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards,” Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, told 404 Media. “ICE is currently deploying armed, masked agents to take people from daycares, street corners, parking lots, and even their own homes, often based on paper thin suspicion and frequently with unjustifiable use of force. It is the mothers, fathers, children, friends, neighbors and coworkers being targeted by ICE who are most vulnerable in this situation.”

“ICE agents don’t want to face accountability for their actions, but documenting ICE and other police activities is essential to guard against abuse of power and improper conduct. Courts have recognized for decades that tracking and reporting on law enforcement activities is an important and time honored public accountability mechanism,” she continued. has more.

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12/11/2025

ICE is allocating as much as $180 million to pay bounty hunters and private investigators who verify the address and location of undocumented people ICE wishes to detain, including with physical surveillance, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

“I am sure P*s, bounty hunters, process servers, and anyone with access to commercial databases can apply and will,” Igor Ostrovskiy, an experienced private investigator told 404 Media. “Money is money and people will jump at the opportunity to embed their business as a government contractor.”The ICE document says the bounty hunters are expected to provide timestamped photos of the location they visit, a target’s utility bills or other proof of residence; employment verification records, and any other evidence.

Ostrovskiy said that the work laid out by ICE will likely be handled by medium to large size businesses based on the case load, potentially requiring more than a hundred field staff and dozens of call office workers. “So this is a move to outsource ICE enforcement partially to large government contractors,” he said. “My immediate reaction is that this is a huge surprise, never expected a federal law enforcement function to get outsourced to private industry. Especially such a controversial one.”

As 404 Media’s Joseph Cox has reported for years, bounty hunters, private investigators, and skip tracers all have access to powerful surveillance technology and tools. That ranges from automatic license plate reader (ALPR) databases that can easily reveal a car’s movements (and by extension, a person’s movements); the personal data related to someone’s credit report which can reveal their address; and location data harvested from smartphones. In 2019, Joseph reported that bounty hunters were able to pay a few hundred dollars for the realtime location of someone’s phone, via location data T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were selling. A private investigator source with access previously demoed the ALPR tracking tool to him and he bought the telecom location data himself. reports.

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11/11/2025

Over the last few months 404 Media has covered some concerning but predictable uses for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are equipped with a built-in camera, and for some models, AI. Aftermarket hobbyists have modified the glasses to add a facial recognition feature that could quietly dox whatever face a user is looking at, and they have been worn by CBP agents during the immigration raids that have come to define a new low for human rights in the United States. Most recently, exploitative Instagram users filmed themselves asking workers at massage parlors for s*x and shared those videos online, a practice that experts told us put those workers’ lives at risk.

404 Media reached out to Meta for comment for each of these stories, and in each case Meta’s rebuttal was a mind-bending argument: What is the difference between Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and an iPhone, really, when you think about it?

In part one of our new series, takes a closer look.

Head to 404media.co or link in bio to learn more.

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