US POLICE AGENCIES TRACKING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WITH CELL PHONE LOCATION DATA: REPORT

Wed 14 September 2022:

Without obtaining search warrants, American law enforcement has been tracking people’s whereabouts using an obscure cellphone tracking app, a U.S. media outlet has reported.

According to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press, police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life.”

Fog Reveal, AP explains, uses advertising identification numbers, which are unique IDs assigned to each mobile device, to track people. It gets its information from aggregators that collect data from apps that serve targeted ads based on a user’s location and interest, such as as Waze and Starbucks.

Both the coffeehouse chain and the Google subsidiary denied explicitly giving their partners permission to share data with Fog Reveal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained access to documents about Fog through Freedom of Information Act requests, which it then shared with AP. EFF special adviser, Bennett Cyphers, describes the tool as “sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget.”

Its prices reportedly start at only $7,500 a year, and some agencies even share access with other nearby departments to bring costs down further. Looking at data from GovSpend, which monitors government spending, AP found that Fog managed to sell around 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies. Authorities have already used it to search hundreds of records from 250 million devices.

The application, sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, has been used to follow the devices through their advertising IDs and unique numbers assigned to each device, which can be traced to users’ homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses, according to the report earlier this month.

Privacy advocates voiced concern that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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