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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.