Fog Revealed: A Guided Tour of How Cops Can Browse Your Location Data

Electronic Frontier Foundation ^

[FarCenter]

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 this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we were able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data.

Fog Reveal offers law enforcement a powerful and incredibly invasive tool for sifting through huge datasets of phone location data. Reveal’s workflow allows cops to perform “geofenced” device searches, i.e. a search for all devices in a specified region on a map, and then find all other locations those devices were at other times. A powerpoint presentation we received from the Chino Police Department describes how cops use these features to identify so-called “bed-down” locations and build up “patterns of life” for device’s owners. These features clearly undercut Fog’s claim that their product only contains “anonymized” data with “no PII [personally identifiable information]”.

[TexasGator]

” I don’t own one and I get along just fine as I have for decades!”

I can watch TV or stream sporting events while waiting for wife to finish shopping

Or check the stock market if really bored

I can access my accounts when I am away without worrying about using a third party wifi

[minnesota_bound]

#16 My brother is not very good with navigating in strange areas. When he first came to visit me at my new home, I used an app to monitor his movements and give him turn-by-turn real time directions.

Ok brother now turn left at the living room then right to the kitchen then straight ahead to bathroom... : )

[Svartalfiar]

But, of course, the cell towers get my location continuously.

The only location data cell towers get is which tower you're connected to. GPS data is entirely separate and doesn't have much/any use for cell tower connection.