Tracking senior European Union officials has become "extremely easy" through location information commercialized by data brokers, despite the continent having some of the world's strictest data protection laws. According to German independent media Netzpolitik, EU officials have expressed concerns about the transaction of mobile phone location data of citizens and officials and issued new guidance on tracking behavior to employees in various departments.
A group of reporters obtained a data sample, a free demo data provided by a data broker, containing 278 million location records of the mobile phones of millions of residents in Belgium. Much of this data is collected by common apps on users’ phones and sold to data brokers, who then resell the data to government and military agencies.
The sample also includes detailed movement trajectories of senior European officials, with some of the affected individuals working directly for the European Commission, which is headquartered in Brussels. By analyzing the positioning information, the reporter successfully identified hundreds of personnel equipment in sensitive positions, including 2,000 positioning marks on the equipment of 264 officials, and approximately 5,800 positioning marks on more than 750 devices in the European Parliament.
Although the EU has what is known as the world's strictest data protection regulations (such as GDPR), according to Netzpolitik reports, multiple European regulatory agencies and officials have so far been slow to crack down on data brokers. The data brokerage industry has grown into a billion-dollar industry involving personal location and other private information.
To deal with location tracking, Apple users can anonymously handle device identifiers through system functions, while Android users are advised to reset their device identifiers regularly.
Last year, data brokerage Gravy Analytics suffered a data breach that exposed the in-depth location information of tens of millions of people, including their home addresses and work locations. Researchers point out that such records can easily be used to track an individual's recent movements in detail.