CDC SPIED ON AMERICANS

New York City NY

Description

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used cell phone location data to track at least 20 million American phones to monitor if they were being compliant with Covid lockdown policies, according to government documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Vice News. The details: The CDC paid $420,000 to a company called SafeGraph for daily cell phone location data, harvested from tens of millions of phones. The data tracks user movement like: if you stayed inside your home if you complied with curfews if you went to church how often you visited K-12 schools if you went to pharmacies for a vaccine if you visited a neighbor's home According to cybersecurity expert Zach Edwards, who spoke to Vice News: “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor to neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools, and pharmacies." They're not done: Although the CDC bought the data for Covid research, they are interested in continuing to access your data to watch for patterns as the country re-opens.