Governments and law enforcement have long chafed at the constitutional requirement to obtain a warrant before conducting searches. But what about private sector programs that sweep-up massive amounts of private data, without regard for innocent, guilt or even a crime? Would law enforcement be able to buy this data, monitor people without their knowledge and certainly without those pesky warrants?
That’s what they have been doing for some time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated the practice, and what they found was astounding:
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.
The company, Fog Data Science, has claimed in marketing materials that it has “billions” of data points about “over 250 million” devices and that its data can be used to learn about where its subjects work, live, and associate. Fog sells access to this data via a web application, called Fog Reveal, that lets customers point and click to access detailed histories of regular people’s lives. This panoptic surveillance apparatus is offered to state highway patrols, local police departments, and county sheriffs across the country for less than $10,000 per year.
The records received by EFF indicate that Fog has past or ongoing contractual relationships with at least 18 local, state, and federal law enforcement clients; several other agencies took advantage of free trials of Fog’s service. EFF learned about Fog after filing more than 100 public records requests over several months for documents pertaining to government relationships with location data brokers. EFF also shared these records with The Associated Press.
Troublingly, those records show that Fog and some law enforcement did not believe Fog’s surveillance implicated people’s Fourth Amendment rights and required authorities to get a warrant.
The entire report is worth reading as is the AP story on the topic.
How can you protect your digital data? Ars Technica has some pointers:
To prevent future location data logs from being generated on the police surveillance tool, EFF reported that there’s one thing everyone can do. Mobile device advertiser identifiers have become “one key digital advertising technology that Fog and other data brokers have turned into a police surveillance technology,” so users disabling ad IDs can go far to block unwanted tracking.
For iOS users, starting in iOS 10.0, Apple disabled ad IDs by default. Android users aren’t so lucky but can update settings to disable the ad ID. To walk users through the process of disabling ad IDs, EFF provides this guide for both iOS and Android users. EFF also recommends that anyone in California submit a “right to know” request to Venntel under the California Privacy Act.
And one thing to remember: Apps may offer a world of wonder and promise. So easy to use! So much fun! But in the end, many are little more than data harvesters…making you the product.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Purchase and use a phone, belong to FaceBook, any kind of online social media, or use a computer…AT YOUR PERIL. It’s been creeping up on us for a looooong time, but Big Brother sees everything.