Surveillance
The Tool That Lets Police Track Your Every Move. No Warrant Needed.
Picture this.
You stopped at a gas station on a Tuesday night. Filled up your tank. Grabbed a water and a bag of chips. Back in the car in maybe four minutes.
You didn't see anything. Nothing seemed off. You drove home, went to bed, and forgot it ever happened.
Three hours after you left, someone got robbed in that same parking lot.
You had nothing to do with it. You didn't witness it. You don't even know it happened. But your phone was in your pocket when you pulled in, and your phone was pinging its location data the entire time.
A detective catches the case. He pulls up a tool called Fog Reveal. He draws a digital boundary around that gas station and selects a six-hour window. The tool spits back a list of every device that was in that parking lot during that time.
Your advertising ID is on the list.
The system traces your device's movement patterns going back months. It finds where you are every morning at 8am. It finds where you are every night by 10pm. It builds a complete map of your life. Your house. Your job. Your gym. Your kids' school. The doctor you visited three weeks ago. The church you go to on Sundays.
Now you are a person of interest in a robbery you know nothing about.
No warrant was issued. No judge approved anything. Nobody notified you. The detective just logged into a subscription service, drew a circle on a map, and your life was laid open.
That tool is called Fog Reveal. And your local police department may already be paying for it.
What Fog Reveal Actually Is
Fog Reveal is a product of Fog Data Science LLC, a Virginia-based company founded in 2016 by two former officials from the Department of Homeland Security. It is not a household name. The company has no public website. It does not hold press conferences. It does not want you to know it exists.
Every app on your phone has something called an advertising ID. It is a unique number tied to your specific device. App developers use it to sell targeted advertising. When you open Starbucks, Waze, a weather app, a coupon app, a game, or almost anything else, that ID gets pinged and your location at that moment gets logged.
That data gets sold to data brokers. The brokers sell it upstream to companies like Venntel, a Virginia-based firm that aggregates it into a massive database. Fog Data Science purchases that data from Venntel and builds a searchable interface on top of it called Fog Reveal.
Police departments pay a subscription to access it. Once they are logged in, they search like they are using Google Maps.
They draw a boundary on a map, pick a date range, and the tool pulls every device ID that was in that area during that window. From there, the system traces where each of those devices went before and after. Where they were at 6am. Where they went at midnight. Where they went back to every single night for the past several months.
That is how it identifies your home. Your office. Your place of worship. Your regular routines. Your medical appointments. Your associations. All of it, compiled automatically, from the apps you use every day.
The company calls the data anonymous because it uses advertising IDs rather than names. Investigators have been blunt about what they actually do with it. A Missouri law enforcement official wrote in a 2019 internal document: "There is no personal information linked to the ad ID. But if we are good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner."
They figure it out.
The Murder Case That Shows Both Sides of This Tool
Supporters of Fog Reveal point to a 2020 murder case in Arkansas as proof that the tool saves lives.
In August of that year, a 25-year-old nurse named Sydney Sutherland went out for a jog near Newport, Arkansas, and never came home. Investigators had almost nothing to work with. The only physical evidence was her cellphone, found abandoned in a ditch.
A local prosecutor named Jeff Rogers turned to Fog Reveal. He drew a geofence around the area where Sutherland was last seen and ran a search. He shared the results with the U.S. Marshals Service. Together they identified devices in the area around the time she disappeared, and that data helped lead investigators to a local farmer who was later arrested and charged with her rape and murder.
Rogers told the Associated Press afterward that Fog had been invaluable, adding that investigators could not wait on the traditional search warrant route.
Law enforcement agencies have used that case ever since as justification for the tool. Here is what they leave out.
When Rogers drew that geofence, he did not pull only the killer's device. He pulled every device that was anywhere near that location during that window. Every jogger. Every driver passing through. Every neighbor who had their phone on while they sat in their own home nearby. All of them had their location histories traced, their patterns of life mapped, their homes and workplaces and daily routines logged in a law enforcement database.
None of those people knew it happened. None of them were suspects. None of them consented. And because Fog Reveal is almost never mentioned in court records, not a single one of them has any way of knowing their data was pulled, let alone any way to challenge it.
That is the trade the prosecutor made. Catch one guilty person. Drag in dozens of innocent ones. And keep the whole thing hidden from everyone, including the people whose lives were just quietly mapped by the government.
What Happens When the Tool Gets It Wrong
That dragnet problem is not theoretical. It has already destroyed innocent lives.
In Phoenix, Arizona, a warehouse worker named Jorge Molina was arrested for murder. Police were investigating a fatal drive-by shooting and ran a geofence search that placed a phone matching Molina's account at the scene of the killing. He owned a white Honda Civic. The car in the surveillance footage was a white Honda Civic. To investigators, it looked like an airtight case.
Police told Molina directly: "We know, one hundred percent, without a doubt, that his phone was at the shooting scene."
Molina spent a week in jail, lost his job, and lost his car while the case moved forward.
He had nothing to do with it.
What investigators had failed to determine was that Molina had lent his old phone to an acquaintance. The phone was still logged into his account. The acquaintance was the actual shooter. Molina was eventually released when investigators identified the real suspect. But by then the damage to his life had already been done.
His case is not unique. A man in Gainesville, Florida became the lead suspect in a home burglary investigation simply because he was riding his bicycle through the neighborhood around the time the crime occurred. His location data showed up in the geofence. That was enough for police to target him. He had done nothing wrong. He had simply been outside.
In both cases, the logic is the same. Your phone was there. Therefore you are a suspect. The burden then shifts to you to prove otherwise, without ever being told what tool was used to identify you or how to challenge it.
The Legal Loophole They Are Exploiting
Here is the part that should make your blood boil.
The Supreme Court has ruled that police need a warrant to use GPS tracking devices. They need a warrant to pull historical cell tower location data. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect American citizens from exactly this kind of broad, suspicionless surveillance.
Fog Reveal slides through a gap in that protection.
The legal argument works like this. When you downloaded those apps, you agreed to the terms of service. That agreement, buried in a wall of text you never read, technically gives those apps permission to collect and share your location data. Because that data was voluntarily shared, it is considered commercially available. Fog is simply purchasing data that was already on the open market. And when a government agency purchases commercially available data, courts have not yet clearly ruled that a warrant is required.
Legal scholars continue to debate whether this survives Fourth Amendment scrutiny. But law enforcement has been operating as though the question is already settled in their favor. Some agencies did not consult their legal teams before purchasing access. At least one Arkansas prosecutor openly admitted using the tool without a warrant, describing the reasoning simply as urgency.
No warrant. No judge. No paper trail. No accountability.
An attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation described it plainly: "There is no particular individual who the government is suspicious of. It is a dragnet."
What They Are Actually Monitoring
The concern goes well beyond crime scenes.
Fog Reveal lets any subscribing officer draw a geofence around any location they choose. Any building. Any block. Any event. The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed through its investigation that the tool has been used to monitor places of worship, health care clinics, and other sensitive locations that have nothing to do with criminal activity.
In December 2024, newly surfaced documents revealed something even more alarming. Fog Data Science had been actively instructing law enforcement agencies to use the tool to map out the locations of suspects' personal physicians and private attorneys. Not to solve crimes. To build pressure files. To understand who a person trusts and where they turn when they need help.
Think about what that means. An officer does not need to suspect you of anything specific. He just needs to be curious about you. He can log in, draw a geofence around your doctor's office, and confirm you were there on a Tuesday. He can draw one around your lawyer's office and verify you sought legal counsel last month. None of it requires a warrant. None of it shows up in any court filing. And you will never know it happened.
The App Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Most people, when they think about surveillance, picture the major platforms. Google. Facebook. Search history.
Fog Reveal is not built on any of that.
It starts with something called an advertising ID. Every standard smartphone comes with one pre-installed, baked directly into the operating system before you ever turn the phone on for the first time. Apple calls theirs the IDFA. Google calls theirs the GAID. Different names, same function. It is a unique number assigned to your device that follows you everywhere your phone goes and ties all of your app activity together into a single trackable profile.
That ID is the foundation the entire system runs on. On Apple phones, it cannot be deleted. Period. You can bury it in your settings and limit which apps can request access to it, but the ID itself lives on your device permanently. On Android phones, deleting it is technically possible but the process is buried several menus deep in settings most people will never find, varies depending on the make and model of the phone, and is not available at all on older Android versions. The average person has no idea any of this exists, and the phone companies have no intention of making it easier to find.
From there, it is built on data from thousands of small, forgettable apps that people install and never think about again. The coupon clipper. The free game. The local news app. The weather radar. The store loyalty app. Every time one of those apps checks your location in the background, that ping gets tied to your advertising ID and goes somewhere. It flows through brokers and aggregators and eventually lands in databases like the one Fog Data Science sells access to.
Most users have no idea this is happening. Some app developers have no idea either. Starbucks released a statement after the story broke saying the company had never approved its advertising data to be used this way. Waze said the same thing. It did not matter. The data had already moved long before either company knew to object.
That is the reality of the ecosystem your phone is sitting inside right now. Your location is being collected, packaged, and resold dozens of times over. And you have almost no practical ability to stop it on a standard smartphone.
The Only Real Fix
There is only one way to actually break the chain, and it requires more than adjusting your privacy settings.
It requires a phone that does not generate an advertising ID at all.
Not a phone with a restricted advertising ID. Not a phone with location permissions toggled off. A phone running an operating system that strips out the advertising infrastructure entirely, before you ever open a single app.
No advertising ID means no location ping. No location ping means no data for brokers to collect. No data in the broker pipeline means nothing for Fog Reveal to find when a detective draws a geofence around a gas station you stopped at on a Tuesday night.
That kind of phone exists. It is not what carriers sell. It is not what you find at Best Buy. Most people have never heard of it, just like most people have never heard of Fog Reveal.
But if what you just read unsettled you, and it should, it is worth looking into before something like this lands at your door.
Fog Reveal did not build the surveillance network your phone is feeding right now. They just figured out how to sell access to it for less than ten thousand dollars a year.
The question is whether you are going to do anything about it.
The Ghost Phone
No advertising ID. No location pings. No data for Fog Reveal to find.
Ed Warren is a privacy researcher and investigative writer covering surveillance, data privacy, and the technology being used to monitor ordinary Americans.
