Journalists in Europe have found it “easy” to spy on senior European Union officials using commercially obtained location histories sold by data brokers, despite the continent having some of the strongest data protection laws in the world.
Netzpolitik reports that EU officials are “concerned” about the trade in cell phone location data of citizens and officials and have issued new guidance to staff to combat tracking.
Reporters obtained the data set provided as a free sample by a data broker. The dataset includes 278 million location data points from millions of mobile phones across Belgium. Much of the location data is uploaded by regular apps installed on individuals' mobile phones and sold to data brokers. These data brokers sell that data to governments and militaries.
The dataset also included detailed location histories of senior European officials, including those working directly at the Brussels-based European Commission.
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 the devices of 264 officials and around 5,800 location markers from more than 750 devices at the European Parliament.
Europe has the strongest data protection rules in the world, the GDPR law. However, watchdogs and authorities across Europe have been slow to take stronger enforcement action against data brokers, NetPolitic reported. Data brokering has grown into a billion-dollar industry that involves selling and trading people's location data and other personal information.
To combat some of this location tracking, Apple customers can anonymize their device identifiers, and Android owners can reset their device identifiers periodically.
Last year, a data broker called Gravy Analytics suffered a data breach that exposed tens of millions of people's location data, including where they were, where they lived, and where they worked. Researchers studying the data said the location records could be used to broadly track people's recent whereabouts.