Zack Whittaker reports:
Journalists in Europe found it was “easy” to spy on top 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.
EU officials said they’re “concerned” about the trade of citizen and officials’ mobile phone location data, and have issued new guidance to staff to counter the tracking, according to a report by Netzpolitik.
A coalition of reporters obtained the dataset, offered as a free sample from a data broker, containing 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people around Belgium. Much of the location data is uploaded by ordinary apps installed on a person’s phone, which is sold to data brokers. Those data brokers then sell that data to governments and militaries.
The dataset also included the granular location histories of Europe’s top officials, including those who work directly for the European Commission, which has its headquarters in Brussels.
Read more at TechCrunch.