The Central Command under the U.S. Department of Defense recently disclosed that U.S. military personnel deployed in overseas theaters have been targeted and monitored by adversaries using location data obtained through commercial channels, highlighting that the global "surveillance economy" is profoundly changing the modern battlefield landscape.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, shared with the media a response letter from Central Command stating that the U.S. military "has received multiple threat reports involving adversaries using commercial location data to target or monitor U.S. personnel in theater." The letter, dated April 14, did not disclose further details, but Central Command's area of responsibility includes the Gulf region, where the U.S. military is currently confronting the Iranian military in the Strait of Hormuz.
Wyden and cross-party lawmakers said in a follow-up joint letter to the Pentagon that this disclosure is the first time the US military has officially confirmed that the military has been "targeted" by commercial positioning data in actual combat zones. The joint letter warned that "commercial positioning data can be used to identify US military assembly locations and their daily action patterns, which adversaries can use to launch missiles, drones, roadside bombs and other attacks, and can also be used for counterintelligence activities." Wyden also called in the statement to "start treating the advertising technology industry as a national security threat."
The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment. The congressmen disclosed in the letter that they had tried many times to learn more about the relevant threats from the military, but had failed to obtain substantive information.
Location data is widely used in the digital advertising industry and is an important source of revenue for many technology companies. The data is typically collected by apps and service providers on smartphones or other devices and sold to data brokers, who aggregate it and resell it multiple times through a complex network of middlemen. The privacy risks of selling people's travel trajectories to the open market have long been discussed, and its potential national security implications have attracted increasing attention in recent years.
As early as 2016, a U.S. defense contractor used publicly sold positioning data to track U.S. Special Forces from their bases in the United States to locate a sensitive assembly point in Syria. This case was first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal and shocked public opinion.
Recently, the American technology media "Wired" and two German media exposed the detailed entry and exit trajectories of personnel stationed or working around 11 US military and intelligence facilities in Germany based on billions of coordinate data provided by a data broker. This once again confirmed that commercial location data can be used to create high-precision "portraits" of sensitive military targets.
In the face of doubts, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, two groups representing the interests of the digital advertising industry, did not respond to interview emails sent by the media. In a joint letter to the Pentagon, the lawmakers pointed out that given that the military has long understood the risks of location data trading, it should have taken steps to protect personnel safety earlier, such as disabling unique advertising identifiers on military-issued devices, automatically turning off smartphone location sharing in battlefield environments, and guiding personnel to abandon the use of Google Chrome browser and switch to more privacy-focused alternatives.
One of the signatories of the letter, Republican Congressman Pat Harrigan from North Carolina and a former US Army Special Forces officer, said that browsers such as Chrome are "architecturally designed to collect and share user data." As long as these products continue to be installed on government-issued devices, "we are putting a weapon in the hands of our adversaries every day to use against our own soldiers."
In response to related accusations, Google parent company Alphabet responded that Chrome has "industry-leading security" and emphasized that the company has long advocated the introduction of stricter rules and protective measures for the behavior of data brokers, and supports the strengthening of national-level privacy legislation. Fierce debate is expected to continue between U.S. politics and the tech industry over the regulation of commercial location data, the boundaries of the ad tech industry, and its potential impact on national security.