Commercial location data is being used to target US servicemembers, lawmakers warn
Commercial location data is being used to target US servicemembers, lawmakers warn
Publish Date: 2026-05-29 13:10:00
Source Domain: www.nextgov.com
Foreign adversaries have used commercially available data from U.S. servicemembers to target their locations in active war zones, a bipartisan group of lawmakers revealed Thursday.
In a letter to Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies, fourteen members of Congress — led by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C. — warned that the Pentagon “has not taken basic steps to protect U.S. military personnel from the serious counterintelligence and force protection threat posed by the collection and sale of personal information, including cell phone location data, by data brokers.”
Reuters first reported the news.
According to unclassified written responses that the lawmakers shared with their letter, U.S. Central Command revealed last month that it “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.”
This type of data can be acquired from legitimate data brokers for a nominal fee and then used to track the locations of groups of individuals, particularly those who follow set routines or are based in remote areas.
“That foreign adversaries are still able to buy location data collected from the phones of U.S. personnel serving in military hotspots is a direct result of DOD leadership’s failure to prioritize this threat and implement common sense cyber defenses recommended by federal cybersecurity experts,” the lawmakers wrote.
The Pentagon has been aware for some time now of the security vulnerabilities posed by publicly available location data from smartphones or other wearable electronic devices.
When mobile fitness app Strava released a Global Heat Map of its users’ activities in late 2017, it inadvertently gave away the locations of some U.S. military sites in the Middle East and provided precise details on the routes personnel took when they jogged. Similar location data from running app Polar also revealed the…
