Journalists in Europe found it was “easy” to spy on top European Union officials using commercially downloaded location histories sold by data brokers, despite the continent having some of the strongest data protection laws in the world.
EU officials have said they are “concerned” about the trade in mobile phone location data of citizens and officials and have issued new guidance to staff to tackle the surveillance, according to a report by Netzpolitik.
A coalition of journalists obtained the dataset, offered as a free sample by a data broker, which contained 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people across Belgium. Much of the location data is downloaded from common apps installed on a person’s phone, which is sold to data brokers. These data brokers then sell this data in governments and armies.
The dataset also included the detailed location histories of Europe’s top officials, including those who work directly for the European Commission, which is based in Brussels.
The reporters said they were able to identify hundreds of devices belonging to people working in sensitive areas across the EU, including 2,000 location markers from 264 officials’ devices and around 5,800 location markers from more than 750 devices in the European Parliament.
Europe has some of the strongest data protection rules in the world with the GDPR law. But watchdogs and officials across Europe have been slow to take stronger enforcement measures against data brokers, Netzpolitik reported. Data brokering has grown into a billion-dollar industry that involves the sale and trade of people’s location data and other personal information.
To counter some of this location tracking, Apple customers can anonymize their device IDs and Android owners can regularly reset their device ID.
Last year, a data broker called Gravy Analytics had a data breach that exposed the location data belonging to tens of millions of people, including where they’ve been and where they live and work. Researchers who reviewed the data said location records could be used to extensively track people’s recent locations.
