cstacy writes:
Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.
The tool is called “Fog Reveal”. It uses data from advertising identification numbers culled from apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on location. It searches hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices to create “patterns of life" analysis of a person’s movements and interests.
It has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. “It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation