- Journalists used data brokers to track EU commissioners in their daily lives
- This used free samples from brokers with 5,800 location pings
- This information would be invaluable in espionage campaigns targeting the EU
If you’re worried that your phone is collecting outrageous amounts of data that could be used for nefarious purposes, you’re not alone—and in fact, you’re not wrong. Journalists have just revealed how easy it is to carry out sophisticated reconnaissance missions on EU commissioners with nothing but openly traded information from data brokers.
A coalition of journalists used preview data from a data broker to pinpoint the exact location of hundreds of EU officials – with over 5,800 European Parliament location pings from 756 devices.
The collective was able to establish ‘movement profiles’ of EU staff, tracking movements between official residences back and forth between the EU Parliament, supermarkets, restaurants, religious buildings, parties and more.
Privacy is dead
For most of us, this news will come as an unsurprising but despicable invasion of personal digital privacy, and as a warning about the extent of mass surveillance carried out by private companies in the name of advertising (or perhaps something even more sinister).
But for EU officials, there are very real additional considerations of safety and security.
Most of us won’t have to plan our escape routes in the event of a political attack, nor do we need to take mitigation measures to protect ourselves from espionage campaigns – but this research reveals that EU officials may need to get more serious about data protection – fast.
These are not abstract threats either. The rise of the war in Ukraine has seen an increase in espionage campaigns targeting Western allied states, and Chinese hackers are targeting European diplomats with Windows zero-day flaws in cyber-based intrusions.
Officials are being targeted, and technology and the commercialization of personal data have made this much easier for foreign or domestic adversaries.
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