Fog Data News Today

Earlier this year, a cross-team group of EFF technologists, researchers, activists, and lawyers broke the story of Fog Data Science, a secretive data broker that sells cops access to huge quantities of people's precise location data. The data they use is harvested from our phone apps, sent to data...

In the week since EFF and the Associated Press exposed how Fog Data Science purchases geolocation data on hundreds of millions of digital devices in the United States, and maps them for easy-to-use and cheap mass surveillance by police, elected officials have voiced serious concerns about this...

The Supreme Court may have extended constitutional protection to historical cell site location info, but that's not going to stop our public servants -- and the private companies that serve them -- from finding ways to elude the ramifications of the Carpenter decision. Over the past couple of years, court documents and public records have…

Posts about fog data science written by Tim Cushing

An EFF investigation of public records acquired from dozens of state and local law enforcement agencies has uncovered a widely-used mass surveillance technology. Americans are accustomed to hearing about how the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even the domestically-focused Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have illegally swept up

In Chino, CA, police used Fog Data Science’s geolocation service to do massive sweeps revealing who was near minor theft and burglary scenes. In a rural Missouri murder investigation, Fog’s service was used to track a babysitter who was never a suspect. In Greensboro, NC, a crime analysis supervisor raised red flags about its constitutionality and later quit after his warnings

If a company wants to advertise something to you on the internet, it first has to know who you are and what you like to buy. There are many different approaches to gathering this data, but all generally have one goal in common: they link you with the data generated by your devices. If law enforcement wants to track you via data generated by your devices, it first has to know

In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results. In

A data broker has been selling raw location data about individual people to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, EFF has learned. This personal data isn’t gathered from cell phone towers or tech giants like Google — it’s obtained by the broker via thousands of different apps on Android and iOS app stores as part of the larger location data marketplace.

Police from around the country have been using data culled from thousands of apps for suspect surveillance, often without search warrants.