Democratic senators are attempting to regulate the way police agencies obtain private data from data brokers and apps. Legislation proposed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon mirrors the concerns of privacy advocates who worry that pattern-of-life and location tracking sets dangerous precedents. 

Privacy advocates are concerned that the use of data tracking methods without a search warrant could violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And weaken protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“It wasn’t long ago that it would take high-tech equipment or a dedicated group of agents to track a person’s movements around the clock. Now, it just takes a few thousand dollars and the willingness to get in bed with shady data brokers.”

 “It is an outrage that data brokers are selling detailed location data to law enforcement agencies around the country... including in states that have made personal reproductive health decisions into serious crimes,” Wyden said.

Wyden’s legislation that would limit U.S. law enforcement agencies' ability to buy cell phone tracking tools. And curtain their use of the apps which follow people’s whereabouts. This includes tracking years back, to confirm a person’s movements.

FTC investigation of private data brokers 

Police agencies have been using platforms like “Fog Reveal” in a myriad of investigations. Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC has been brokering their tracking information to police departments across the country since 2018.

The app enables searching hundreds of billions of records gathered from 250 million mobile devices. And allows the searcher to pinpoint people’s geolocation data. In most cases pattern-of-life information can be assembled using thousands of pages of records compiled by the company.

According to a recent series of AP investigative articles “oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape.”

In August, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued a data broker similar to Fog called Kochava. The concern is that clients are obtaining advertising IDs that the FTC says can be used to find where a mobile device user lives.

Criminal investigations ranging from unsolved murders, missing persons and a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol involve similar tools.

Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat claims “Americans are increasingly aware that their privacy is evaporating before their eyes, and the real-world implications can be devastating. Today, companies we’ve all heard of as well as companies we’re completely unaware of are collecting troves of data about where we go, what we do, and who we are.” 

The FTC did not comment about Fog Reveal, in particular.

The future of crime solving?

Matthew Broderick, Fog Reveal managing partner, told AP that local law enforcement was “at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, but often fell behind in technology adoption.”

“We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments,” he added that the company does not have access to people’s personal information, nor are search warrants required. The company refused to share information about how many police agencies it works with.

Fog Reveal was created by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cell phone apps that target ads. These apps include Waze, Starbucks and many others that are location based.

The NYPD has acknowledged a trial-basis use of Fog Reveal at its Real Time Crime Center in 2018 and 2019. A spokesperson emailed a statement that it was “strictly in the interest of developing leads for criminal investigations and lifesaving operations such as missing persons.”

The department did not say if it was still in use. And how successful the data tracking was in 2018-19.