Mobile advertisers and data brokers routinely collect vast amounts of sensitive information without individuals’ meaningful consent. Sometimes this collection is explicitly mentioned in the terms of service that advertisers provide. However, in many other cases, this collection is linked to “free” functionality services that developers integrate into their applications at the cost of losing control of their users’ data.
These kinds of data brokers fuel a large and mostly invisible data market. But there are times where aspects of it (accidentally) emerge from the shadows.
Recent reporting, first covered by 404 Media, reveals how Fog Reveal sells geolocation services to government agencies. Geofences can be placed around targeted persons’ friends’ and families’ homes, places of worship, doctors’ offices, and offices of a person’s lawyer. Fences can be established retroactively as well as proactively.
These same capacities, it must be noted, can and are also exploited by non-law enforcement agencies. Recent reporting has showcased how the activities of these kinds of data brokers can endanger national security, and they can also put the safety of political and business leaders, to say nothing of regular people, at risk of harm.
Fog Reveal and similar companies are offering an expansive for-sale surveillance capacity. And the capacity, which was once the thing of science fiction, has somehow become banally available for those who can convince private vendors to provide access to the data they have collected.
There remains an open question of how to remedy the current situation: should the focus be on regulating bad actors after they appear or, instead, invest the political capital required to stop the processes enabling the data collection in the first place?
Excited Pixels 