Resounding! Millions of Americans spied on cell phones by US health centers during the pandemic
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the US health center, spied on millions of Americans using cell phone location data to track movements and monitor whether people were observing curfews during the pandemic.
According to 2021 CDC documents obtained by Motherboard via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the program tracked patterns of people visiting K-12 schools and, in one case, tracked "the effectiveness of the policy. in the Navajo nation ”. The documents reveal that while the CDC used the pandemic to justify buying the data more quickly, it actually intended to use it for the agency's general purposes.
The documents reveal the CDC's extensive plan to use positioning data obtained from a highly controversial source, SafeGraph. This company got $ 420,000 from the CDC for a year of data access, and among its investors is Peter Thiel and the former Saudi intelligence chief. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June. – Motherboard
Purchased data comes from cell phones, which means SafeGraph can track where a person lives, works and has been, and then sells that data to various entities. Technically the CDC bought aggregate data, designed to follow general trends in how people move, however the researchers have raised concerns that this data may be de-anonymized, then tied back to individual people.
According to CDC documents, SafeGraph data "has been critical to ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counting of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring."
“The CDC appears to have purposely created an open list of use cases, which included curfew monitoring, visits from neighbors, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analyzes with these data specifically. focused on “violence, '” said Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data market.
As for the unmasking of people, Edwards noted how SafeGraph's data can be used to locate certain individuals.
“In my opinion, SafeGraph data is well below any security threshold [around anonymity],” he said, pointing to a result in the SafeGraph user interface that showed individual movements to a specific practice, highlighting how it was possible to identify individuals individually.
The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential data use cases”. They include:
- “Track the behavioral patterns of those who visit the primary and secondary schools of the school and compare them with 2019; compare with the epi metric [Environmental Performance Index], if possible. "
- "Examination of the correlation of data on mobility models and the increase in COVID-19 cases […] Restrictions on movements (border closures, interregional and neighboring curfews) to demonstrate compliance".
- “Examining the Effectiveness of Public Policy on the [] Navajo Nation”.
Cell phone location data was used during the pandemic for various purposes, including by media organizations to track people's movements. But no one has ever gone so far as to monitor a specific population, among other things with a different ethnic base, such as the Navajo nation. We are far beyond what should be ethically acceptable, but this parameter has been profoundly distorted by the covid.
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The sensational article! Millions of Americans spied on cell phones by US health centers during the pandemic comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/clamoroso-il-cdc-americano-ha-illegalmente-tracciato-migliaia-di-persone/ on Thu, 05 May 2022 20:08:10 +0000.