"US Police Deployed Obscure Smartphone Tracking Tool With No Warrants"

Researchers at the Associated Press (AP) discovered that various law enforcement agencies in Southern California and North Carolina have deployed an obscure cellphone tracking tool dubbed "Fog Reveal," sometimes without search warrants.  The researchers stated that the tool gave police officers the ability to search billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and harness the ensuing data to create "patterns of life" for each individual, including locations of homes and workplaces.  Fog Reveal was reportedly created by Virginia-based company Fog Data Science and deployed by US police officers as early as 2018 for criminal investigations.  The researchers noted that from a technical standpoint, Fog Reveal relied upon advertising identification numbers gathered from popular smartphone apps that target ads based on a person's movements and interests.  This data was gathered by these companies and then sold to Fog.  According to AP, Fog aggregated the data in a searchable way and created software able to sift through it in an organized manner.  It then sold the software in about 40 contracts to roughly 20 agencies, with prices starting at $7,500 a year.  The technology is controversial since, normally, smartphone geolocation data of individuals should only be requested to Google (Android devices) or Apple (iPhones and iPads) by police forces in possession of a warrant released by a court.  Fog defended this claim by arguing that its data is anonymized, with the company not having any way of linking signals back to a specific device or owner.  At the same time, some of the documents obtained by the researchers suggest police forces may be able to deanonymize the data to identify and locate specific individuals. 

Infosecurity reports: "US Police Deployed Obscure Smartphone Tracking Tool With No Warrants"