The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a federal agency in the United States. Documents recently published by Motherboard show that the health authority would have tracked the geolocation of millions of Americans to ensure that they complied with the containment measures.
How did the CDC use the data from Americans?
The same documents state that the CDC planned to use smartphone location data to monitor schools and churches, and that it also wanted to use the data for purposes unrelated to Covid-19. As in many countries, online freedoms have been violated. In 2020, the CDC purchased access to location data from tens of millions of phones in the United States to analyze curfew compliance.
If the pandemic of Covid-19 was originally the primary reason for purchasing the data, the CDC likely had no intention of stopping there. The documents reveal just what the CDC’s plans were. To begin with, the data were purchased from a controversial data broker: SafeGraph. This company counts Peter Thiel and the former head of the Saudi secret service among its investors. Google even banned this company from the Play Store last June.
There were 21 potential data use cases
According to the documents, the CDC did use the data to monitor curfew compliance the documents indicate that the SafeGraph data “were essential for hourly monitoring of activity in curfew areas or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine tracking.”. According to Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data market, the CDC has also created other observation scenarios.
Beyond curfew surveillance, the CDC also intended to analyze neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to places of worship, schools, and pharmacies, and also a variety of analyses with these data specifically focused on the “violence.”. Motherboard obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the CDC. It reveals a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential data use cases”.
Among the use cases, we find a “examination of the effectiveness of public policies on the Navajo Nation.”. Or a “examination of the correlation between mobility pattern data and the increase in Covid-19 cases”. In another case, the data was to be used to monitor border enforcement. The use of smartphone location data for such a variety of tracking measures, while effective in being better informed about the spread of the pandemic or in informing policy, is likely to be controversial.
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