U.S. military personnel deployed to active war zones are being targeted by adversaries exploiting commercially available location data, illustrating how the global surveillance economy impacts battlefield security. U.S. Central Command (Centcom) officially confirmed this alarming development, reporting “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.”
The message, shared with Reuters by Senator Ron Wyden, offered no specific incidents. However, Centcom’s operational area includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces face the Iranian military. This marks the first official confirmation that U.S. forces have been targeted in an active conflict zone this way, according to Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators who addressed the Pentagon.
Lawmakers warned that “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, and for counterintelligence.”
Senator Wyden issued a forceful statement, asserting it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
The Pentagon did not return messages seeking comment, and lawmakers’ efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the targeting reports have been unsuccessful. This issue highlights privacy concerns surrounding location data, a cornerstone of digital advertising.
Collected from smartphones by apps or service providers, this data is sold to brokers who aggregate and resell it, often via complex networks.
While the privacy implications of selling personal movement data have long been debated, its national security risk has recently gained urgent attention. As early as 2016, a U.S. defense contractor used commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their domestic bases to a sensitive staging post in Syria, according to the Wall Street Journal.
More recently, journalists from Wired and two German news outlets utilized billions of coordinates from a data broker to expose detailed movements of individuals at or near 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany.
In their letter to the Pentagon, U.S. lawmakers argued that military officials should have acted faster to protect personnel, given knowledge of the location data trade.
They suggested measures such as disabling advertising IDs on military devices, turning off location sharing on field smartphones, and steering staff from Google Chrome toward privacy-focused alternatives. Neither the Interactive Advertising Bureau nor the Association of National Advertisers, two digital advertising groups, returned emails seeking comment.
Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican and former U.S. Army Special Forces officer, co-signed the letter, stating that browsers like Chrome “are built from the ground up to collect and share user data.” He warned that “every day they remain on government-issued devices is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops.” In response, Alphabet’s Google maintained that Chrome has “industry-leading security” and has “long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers.”
