Phone location data of senior EU officials is up for sale, report finds

Journalists in Europe have found it “easy” to spy on senior EU officials using commercially obtained location logs sold by data brokers, even though the continent has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world.

EU officials said they were “concerned” about the circulation of mobile phone location data of citizens and officials, and issued new guidance for employees to counter tracking, according to a report by Netzpolitik.

A coalition of reporters obtained the dataset, provided as a free sample from a data broker, which contains 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people across Belgium. Much of the location data is uploaded through regular apps installed on a person’s phone, which are sold to data brokers. Data brokers then sell that data to governments and militaries.

The dataset also included detailed location histories of senior officials in Europe, including those working directly for the European Commission, which is headquartered in Brussels.

The reporters said they were able to identify hundreds of devices belonging to people working in sensitive areas across the European Union, including 2,000 location tags from 264 devices belonging to officials, and about 5,800 location tags from more than 750 devices in the European Parliament.

Europe has some of the strongest data protection rules in the world through its GDPR law. However, regulators and officials across Europe have been slow to take stronger enforcement action against data brokers, Netzpolitik reported. Data brokerage has ballooned into a multibillion-dollar industry involving the selling and trading of people’s location data and other private information.

To counter some of this location tracking, Apple customers can anonymize their device IDs, and Android owners can reset their device ID regularly.

Last year, a data broker called Gravy Analytics suffered a data breach that exposed location data belonging to tens of millions of people, including where they are located and where they live and work. Researchers who examined the data said location logs could be used to track people’s recent whereabouts on a large scale.