Last week, I linked a story by Associated Press investigative journalists Garance Burke and Jason Dearen that revealed a cellphone tracking tool used by several police agencies in the United States. The tool can reveal people’s movements going back months in the past. It’s often used without warrants and rarely mentioned in court documents or trials.
The tool is called “Fog Reveal” and is developed and sold by Virginia-based company, Fog Data Sciences LLC. Police have used the tool since 2018, to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices. The data is compiled and creates location analyses referred to as “patterns of life” by law enforcement.
“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,”
-Bennett Cyphers, special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The company, developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush, relies on your smartphones advertising identification numbers, pulled from popular apps like Starbucks and Waze. While these numbers do not contain the name of the phone’s user, they can be traced to homes and places of work to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses.
Essentially, Fog Reveal is showing the police where these advertising identification numbers are at a given time going back three months. They often continue to help law enforcement with additional information it needs to connect the ad ID to addresses and other clues that help detectives figure out people's identities.
Police departments and prosecutors’ use of Fog Reveal is almost never mentioned in court records, which defense attorneys claim makes it difficult to properly defend their clients when technology is a factor.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “I’m not a criminal, so I don’t have anything to hide.”
That would be a narrow focus that may not always hold true. I don’t mean to say that we all end up being criminals at one time or another, but laws change. When the Supreme Court reversed the decision on Roe v. Wade, a media company bought phone data for $160 showing where people who visited more than 600 Planned Parenthood clinics came from and where they went afterward.
This time it’s Planned Parenthood, but next time it could be gun stores, schools, or places of worship.
What You Can Do
The data is being tracked using your smartphone’s advertising identification number, which is functioning on every iOS and Android device by default. You can opt-opt out of Venntel’s tracking by following these steps.
Another step that you can take, which will eliminate the need for you to opt-out of other data broker’s data collection practices, is switching off your devices advertising identification number manually:
Android: Settings > Google > Ads and turn on Opt out of Ads Personalization.
Apple: Settings > Privacy > Advertising. Turn on Limit Ad Tracking.
This will limit the targeted ads you receive in apps, however, it will not keep you from getting ads altogether.
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