The public should get to see whether a court that authorized the FBI to track someone’s air travels in real time for six months also analyzed whether the surveillance implicated the Fourth Amendment, EFF argued in a brief filed this… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Locational Privacy’
In 2021, the Police Took a Page Out of the NSA’s Playbook: 2021 in Review
With increasing frequency, law enforcement has been using unconstitutional, suspicionless digital dragnet searches in an attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases. Whether these searches are for everyone who was near a building where a crime occurred or who… Read More ›
Coalition Against Stalkerware Celebrates Two Years of Work to Keep Technology Safe for All
In this guest post by the Coalition Against Stalkerware marking its second anniversary, the international alliance takes a look back on its achievements while seeing a lot of challenges ahead. Two years ago, in November 2019, the Coalition Against Stalkerware… Read More ›
Podcast Episode: What Police Get When They Get Your Phone
Episode 101 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet If you get pulled over and a police officer asks for your phone, beware. Local police now have sophisticated tools that can download your location and browsing history, texts, contacts, and… Read More ›
Data Broker Veraset Gave Bulk Device-Level GPS Data to DC Government
In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a location data broker called Veraset offered officials in Washington, DC full access to its proprietary database of “highly sensitive” device-level GPS data, collected from cell phones, for the entire DC metro… Read More ›
EFF Files New Lawsuit Against California Sheriff for Sharing ALPR Data with ICE and CBP
The Marin County Sheriff illegally shares the sensitive location information of millions of drivers with out-of-state and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Sheriff uses automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—high-speed cameras… Read More ›
Illinois Bought Invasive Phone Location Data From Banned Broker Safegraph
The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) purchased access to precise geolocation data about over 40% of the state’s population from Safegraph, the controversial data broker recently banned from Google’s app store. The details of this transaction are described in publicly-available… Read More ›
Why Data-Sharing Mandates Are the Wrong Way To Regulate Tech
The tech companies behind the so-called “sharing economy” have drawn the ire of brick-and-mortar businesses and local governments across the country. For example, take-out apps such as GrubHub and UberEats have grown into a hundred-billion-dollar industry over the past decade,… Read More ›
It’s Time for Google to Resist Geofence Warrants and to Stand Up for Its Affected Users
EFF would like to thank former intern Haley Amster for drafting this post, and former legal fellow Nathan Sobel for his assistance in editing it. The Fourth Amendment requires authorities to target search warrants at particular places or things—like a… Read More ›
Data Brokers are the Problem
Why should you care about data brokers? Reporting this week about a Substack publication outing a priest with location data from Grindr shows once again how easy it is for anyone to take advantage of data brokers’ stores to cause… Read More ›