This article is part of EFF’s investigation of location data brokers and Fog Data Science. Be sure to check out our issue page on Location Data Brokers.
If a company wants to advertise something to you on the internet, it first has to know who you are and what you like to buy. There are many different approaches to gathering this data, but all generally have one goal in common: they link you with the data generated by your devices.
If law enforcement wants to track you via data generated by your devices, it first has to know where to find that data and how it links to you. As it turns out, these goals align quite strongly with the advertisers.
You can probably guess where this is going.
A multi-billion dollar industry of advertising data brokers sells sensitive data gathered from people’s phones to a wide range of clientele, including the U.S. military, federal law enforcement agencies and, as EFF has learned, state and local law enforcement. This is especially problematic because many law enforcement agencies have argued, erroneously, that they don’t need a warrant to buy people’s location data from data brokers.
And there’s one key digital advertising technology that Fog and other data brokers have turned into a police surveillance technology: the ad ID. Although Android and iOS call it different things, an advertiser identifier (ad ID for short) is a random string of letters and numbers generated for your device and attached to bundles of data generated by the apps and websites you use. These bundles of data often include private information about you, such as your year of birth, gender, what search terms you use, and perhaps most importantly for law enforcement, your lo
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