Report: CDC, state, and local authorities in the US have started using anonymized location data from mobile ads to help plan their response to the pandemic
The use of phone location tracking to keep tabs on COVID-19 is becoming increasingly common, and the US appears to be no exception. Source: Wall Street Journal .
EngadgetJon Fingas
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two weeks after reports that the US government was in active talks with Facebook, Google, and others over smartphone location data — the difference is that CDC, state, and local authorities have moved from negotiating access to actually consuming anonymized mobile-ad data for response planning.
It also fits the arc the Wall Street Journal traced by June: location-tracking firms once under fire from privacy activists finding a second life as official pandemic-monitoring vendors, alongside Facebook-powered dashboards for US cities and Google's 131-country mobility reports.
First-order effects
Health officials get movement and social-distancing compliance signals without building any new tracking capability, since the data already exists inside the mobile-ad ecosystem.
Location-data brokers gain a new class of customer — government agencies — at the moment their commercial business was under activist pressure.
Second-order effects
Platforms and data brokers race to productize pandemic analytics: Facebook-funded researchers begin delivering daily updates to cities and states, turning crisis response into a recurring service line.
Privacy advocates face a harder target, because the surveillance runs through anonymized ad data they cannot directly litigate against the way they would a government program.
Third-order effects
The emergency workaround hardens into procurement: internal documents show the CDC later bought location data from millions of phones outright, including for monitoring COVID-rule compliance in the Navajo Nation — a structural shift from borrowing ad data to purchasing it.
If commercial location data becomes standard government infrastructure during crises, expect lasting fights over whether anonymization claims and broker intermediaries exempt agencies from normal surveillance oversight.
The trend: The pandemic is converting commercial location data from a marketing asset into standing government infrastructure, moving from informal platform cooperation to direct agency procurement.
Gov't officials are using cellphone location data to track the movement of COVID-19. “In the U.S., so far, the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://www.wsj.com/...
“The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers—all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government...” https://www.wsj.com/...
NEW this morning: In the U.S., federal, state and local government officials have begun to get data from millions of American cell phones to combat the coronavirus pandemic — tracking crowds and movement, and how those things impact infection rates. https://www.wsj.com/...
The last time gov invoked “exigent circumstances” to get phone data, it was later found to be ineffective & unconstitutional. What's the oversight mechanism? #Privacy https://www.wsj.com/...
Fed, state & local Govt officials across US, thru the CDC, are using location data from millions of cellphones 👀 in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic & how they may be affecting the spread of the disease https://www.wsj.com/...
Government Tracking How People Move Around in Coronavirus Pandemic “Goal is to get location data in up to 500 U.S. cities to help plan response” https://www.wsj.com/...
South Korea did the same thing, then had an app notify people whose phones were detected to have been near #coronavirus hotspots. https://twitter.com/...
Great scoop by @ByronTau Also Taiwan, Germany, Israel using mobile data. South Korea sends text messages with link for users to check where infected people near them have been. https://twitter.com/...
Scoop from @byrontau: In what one privacy activist terms “covidwashing,” government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. https://www.wsj.com/...
US gov authorities have started to receive analyses of movement patterns based on location data from shady firms, who are secretly gathering it from apps. Above all, I think this data is flawed. I told the WSJ strong legal safeguards are needed, at least: https://www.wsj.com/... …