Our Citizen's Forum: A Warning on Fog Data Science Being Used in Nevada
“Most people have no idea this is already happening in Nevada,” Marrico Gill a member of the local NAACP recently wrote to Our Town Reno, concerning a recent contract by the Nevada Department of Public Safety with a company called Fog Data Science.
After emailing the Electronic Frontier Foundation if they knew anything about this, the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world sent us a link which led to the below documents.
“What does it do?” Gill wrote in his initial message to us.
“It allows investigators to track smartphone location data without a warrant by purchasing data collected from everyday mobile apps. The state can reportedly run more than 250 location searches per month under a contract that costs taxpayers around $12,000 per year,” he wrote.
That figure is important since at that level it only needed to be signed off by a state clerk, and not at higher levels of Nevada’s government.
“Fog Data Science buys location information from data brokers and advertisers. Using advertising IDs tied to smartphones, the system can map where devices have traveled over months or even years, creating what they call “patterns of life.”
That means the technology can potentially reveal:
Where people live
Where they work
Who they spend time with
What businesses they visit
What churches, meetings, or community events they attend…
This is not a partisan issue. This is a civil liberties and transparency issue,” Gill concluded in his message. “Worth asking more questions about what is happening locally and what safeguards are actually in place to protect the public.”
He also pointed us to an illuminating, warning flag waving 2022 EFF article which began with “A data broker has been selling raw location data about individual people to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, EFF has learned. This personal data isn’t gathered from cell phone towers or tech giants like Google — it’s obtained by the broker via thousands of different apps on Android and iOS app stores as part of the larger location data marketplace.
The company, Fog Data Science, has claimed in marketing materials that it has “billions” of data points about “over 250 million” devices and that its data can be used to learn about where its subjects work, live, and associate. Fog sells access to this data via a web application, called Fog Reveal, that lets customers point and click to access detailed histories of regular people’s lives. This panoptic surveillance apparatus is offered to state highway patrols, local police departments, and county sheriffs across the country for less than $10,000 per year,” or in this case just barely above $12,000.
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