App-based location harvesting
Location brokers
This page is public-interest research. An argument grade is not a court finding. A watchdog page describes the device. It is not proof a Nevada agency bought it or turned a feature on. A product description is not a Nevada practice. Agencies are not merged: the City of Las Vegas Department of Public Safety, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the Clark County School District, the City of Reno, and the Nevada Department of Public Safety stay separate. A hotlist hit is not a confirmed crime. Legal review of this page is unverified.
What it does
Many phone apps send location to their own servers or to an advertising kit inside the app. A broker can buy that stream. The person agreed to an app prompt, not to a police search. The harvested points can later be sold as a location history.
Privacy watchdog concerns
- Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fog Data Science Puts our Fourth Amendment Rights up for Sale. EFF says Fog sells phone-location data to police and that an area search is the equivalent of a geofence. EFF says a warrant should be required to look up one device and that dragnet area searches raise a Fourth Amendment problem. EFF says location data cannot be anonymized. This is EFF’s argument. Carpenter is not a holding about Fog.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation. Real-Time Location Tracking. EFF says police use purchased location data either to follow one device or to list every device inside a drawn area. EFF describes that area search as the equivalent of a geofence warrant. This is EFF’s description. It is not proof a Nevada agency ran such a query.
Constitutional issues
Unresolved question
Fourth Amendment, Nevada Constitution art. 1, § 18
Warrant practice not established for a Nevada agency
App-based location harvesting: An app-location feed is not documented as a Nevada purchase separate from the Fog reporting. Carpenter does not decide an app feed. A terms-of-service screen is not a warrant.
- Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). Does not decide this technology. United States Supreme Court. Carpenter addressed historical cell-site location information from a carrier. It does not decide advertising-identifier or broker location data.
- United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012). Analogical constitutional argument. United States Supreme Court. Jones decided a GPS device attached to a vehicle. Concurrences discuss longer tracking. The mosaic theory is not a majority rule. The analogy to a broker feed is unresolved.
- United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). Counterauthority. United States Supreme Court. Knotts did not treat public-road beeper tracking as a Fourth Amendment violation on its facts. It is not a holding that a broker feed is lawful.
Statutes attached to read, not findings.
- NRS Chapter 239. Nevada public-records law is the route to ask for contracts, policies, and logs. Citing it is not a finding that a surveillance practice is unlawful.
- Nevada Constitution art. 1, § 18. State search-and-seizure provision. This page does not quote the section. No section anchor was verified. It is listed only where a search question is actually implicated.
- 42 U.S.C. § 1983. A civil remedy for a deprivation of federal rights under color of state law. It is not a warrant statute, and it does not itself make a surveillance practice unlawful.
Nevada use
Not documented on this page.
Capability only. The Fog article is not reused as proof of a second product.
See also: Fog Data Science; Mobile advertising IDs (MAID)
Next record
App-based location harvesting: Ask whether any agency buys an app feed other than the Fog contract. Do not guess the product.
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