CDC spied the American citizens with the excuse of covid
A Vice News report details how the CDC purchased tracking data for millions of American cell phones with plans to monitor their movements to see if they were complying with lockdowns, curfews, and travel restrictions during the pandemic of COVID.
As reported by vice.com, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) purchased access to location data collected from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform curfew compliance analysis, track school attendance patterns and specifically monitor the effectiveness of the policy in the Navajo nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to data faster, it intended to use it for more general purposes.
https://twitter.com/timmarchman/status/1521477790813597702
Reports claim that the CDC paid $ 420,000 for a year of data from a company called SafeGraph, which connects with app developers to collect location data from people's phones. When people download apps to their devices, they are asked to agree to terms that include sharing location data. Purchased data comes from cell phones, which means SafeGraph can track where a person lives, works and has been, and so on.
The company, which is linked to a former Saudi intelligence chief, has since been banned from the Google Play Store for breaching its data collection T & Cs.
Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data market, noted how SafeGraph's data can be used to locate certain individuals, indicating a result in the SafeGraph user interface that showed individual movements towards a specific clinic, highlighting how it was possible to identify individuals.
The CDC appears to have purposely created an open list of use cases, which included curfew monitoring, visits from neighbors, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analyzes with this specifically focused data about violence. In my opinion, SafeGraph data is well below any security threshold around anonymity.
The CDC stated that the tracking is for specific use for the COVID-19 emergency.
But some of the use cases are not explicitly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like "Research points of interest for physical activity and the prevention of chronic diseases such as visits to parks, gyms or other".
Another section of the document delves into the use of location data for programs not related to COVID-19.
"CDC also plans to use the acquired mobility data and services to support non-COVID-19 policy areas and public health priorities across the agency, including but not limited to travel to parks and green spaces, physical activity and modalities. travel and population migration before, during and after natural disasters. The mobility data obtained will be available for use at the CDC agency level and will support numerous CDC priorities."
The CDC did not respond to multiple emails asking for which use cases it has provided SafeGraph data. SafeGraph shared datasets of 18 million cell phones from the United States.
Reference:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-location-data-curfews