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Civil rights attorneys and Democratic senators are pushing for legislation that would limit US law enforcement’s ability to purchase cell phone tracking tools to track people’s whereabouts.
Concerns about police use of a tool known as “Fog Reveal,” raised in an investigation released by the Associated Press earlier this month, also surfaced at a Federal Trade Commission hearing three weeks ago. to sift through hundreds of billions of records collected from 250 million mobile devices, siphoning people’s location data to create so-called “patterns of life” containing thousands of pages of records about companies. are summarized.
Fog Reveal, marketed by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, has been around since at least 2018, from the killing of a nurse in Arkansas to its possible participation in the January 6th Capitol riot. It has even been used in criminal investigations to track the movements of a person.
This tool is rarely mentioned in court records, and defense attorneys say it makes it more difficult to properly defend their clients when the technology is used.
Panelists and members of the public attending FTC hearings also spoke about how data generated by popular apps is being used for surveillance purposes, or “in some cases, to infer identities or people in the community.” used”. In the physical world, as mentioned earlier, it’s being reused for law enforcement and national security purposes,” said Stacey Gray, her senior director of the U.S. program at the Future of Privacy Forum. increase.
“Americans are increasingly aware that their privacy is evolving before their eyes and the impact on the real world can be devastating. Companies we’ve known, as well as those we don’t know, are collecting a ton of data about where we go, what we do, and who we are,” said Sen. Ed Markey, Democrat for Massachusetts.