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 were complying with containment measures.
How did the CDC use Americans’ data?
In those same documents, we can read that the CDC planned to use location data from smartphones to monitor schools and churches, and that it also wanted to use this 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.
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If the Covid-19 pandemic was initially the main reason for buying this data, the CDC probably did not intend to stop there. The documents accurately reveal the CDC’s plans. To begin with, the data was purchased from a highly 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 use cases for the data
According to the documents, the CDC actually used the data to monitor observance of the curfewthe documents indicate that data from SafeGraph “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 follows the data market closely, the CDC also created other observation scenarios.
Beyond curfew monitoring, the CDC also intended to analyze neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to places of worship, schools, and pharmacies, and also a variety of analyzes with these data specifically focused on ” violence “. Motherboard got the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CDC. There is a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential data use cases”.
Use cases include a “review of the effectiveness of public policies on the Navajo Nation”. Or even a “examining the correlation between data on mobility patterns and the increase in Covid-19 cases”. In another case, the data was to be used to monitor compliance with borders. 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 informing policy, may be controversial.