U.S. military officials have reported that forces deployed in combat zones have been targeted using commercially available location data, highlighting how the global surveillance economy is influencing modern warfare.
In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” The message, dated April 14, did not provide further details.
CENTCOM’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf region, where U.S. forces are operating amid tensions with Iranian military forces around the Strait of Hormuz.
The disclosure was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon.
Location Data Trade Fuels Privacy Concerns
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, which is a key source of revenue for many tech companies. Such data is typically collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data brokers who collate and resell the data, sometimes via complex networks of intermediaries.
Although the threat to privacy inherent in selling the details of people’s day-to-day movements on the open market has long been a matter of public discussion, its potential as a national security risk has recently drawn concern as well.
As far back as 2016, one U.S. defense contractor was able to leverage commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their bases in the United States to a sensitive staging post in Syria, according to an account first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal.
More recently, journalists at Wired and two German outlets used billions of location data points from a data broker to track movements around 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany.
Digital advertising groups, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not respond to requests for comment.
In a letter to the Pentagon, U.S. lawmakers said military officials should have acted sooner to protect personnel, including by disabling advertising IDs, turning off location sharing, and moving away from browsers like Google Chrome in favor of more privacy-focused alternatives.
Representative Pat Harrigan, a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer and one of the letter’s signatories, said Chrome is “built from the ground up to collect and share user data,” arguing its continued use on government devices could expose troops to risk.
In response, Alphabet’s Google said Chrome offers “industry leading security” and noted it has long supported stronger rules and protections against data brokers.
(With inputs from Reuters)
