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U.S. military personnel deployed to war zones have been targeted through commercially available location data, according to threat reports received by U.S. Central Command, showing how the global data trade is shaping risks on the battlefield, Reuters reported.
In an April 14 letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.”
The message did not provide further details, but Central Command’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.
The disclosure marks the first official confirmation that U.S. forces have been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers said in a letter sent Thursday to the Pentagon.
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the lawmakers warned.
Wyden said it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
The Pentagon did not respond to messages seeking comment, according to Reuters.
The lawmakers said their attempts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported targeting had been unsuccessful.
Their letter warned that commercially available location data could reveal the movements and routines of U.S. troops, including where they gather and how they move in operational areas.
The lawmakers said such information could be used by adversaries to support attacks or for counterintelligence purposes.
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, a major source of revenue for many technology companies.
The data is usually collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data brokers, which gather and resell it through networks of intermediaries.
The privacy risks linked to selling details of people’s day-to-day movements have long been debated, but the potential national security risk has drawn growing attention.
In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor was able to use commercially available location data to track special operations forces from bases in the U.S. to a sensitive staging post in Syria, according to an account first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
More recently, journalists from Wired and two German news outlets used billions of coordinates collected by a data broker to show detailed movements of people at or near 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany.
Two groups representing digital advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not respond to emails seeking comment, Reuters reported.
The lawmakers said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect personnel.
The letter said the military could disable unique advertising IDs attached to military-issued devices, automatically turn off location sharing on smartphones in the field and steer staff away from Google’s Chrome browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.
U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan, a Republican from North Carolina and former U.S. Army Special Forces officer, also signed the letter.
Harrigan said browsers such as Chrome “are built from the ground up to collect and share user data,” adding that every day they remain on government-issued devices “is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops.”
Google, owned by Alphabet, said Chrome had “industry-leading security” and added that it had “long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers.”
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