CDC Used Location Data From Millions Of Phones To See If Americans Obeyed COVID Orders

Documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the agency tracked location data from at least 20 million phones to monitor compliance with COVID-19 policies, according to a new report revealed on Tuesday.

A Freedom of Information Act request from CYBER — a cybersecurity podcast hosted by Vice’s Motherboard — revealed that the CDC “bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States” to perform “analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation,” according to Vice.

The CDC paid data broker SafeGraph $420,000 for one years’ access to location data “derived from at least 20 million active cellphone users per day across the United States,” according to the CDC documents, which add that the data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.”

Cybersecurity researcher Zach Edwards explained to Motherboard that “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor to neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’”- READ MORE