Lawmakers warn adtech location data threatens U.S. troops in war zones

Commercial location data gathered by ordinary phones and apps has become a national-security problem, not just a privacy headache. One leading privacy lawmaker said it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat,” after lawmakers said the data can reveal where U.S. troops congregate and how they move.

U.S. Central Command told Congress in an April 14 letter that it had received multiple threat reports about adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater. Lawmakers described the disclosure as the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone. CENTCOM’s area of responsibility includes the Persian Gulf region and the Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. forces have faced off against the Iranian military.

The letter said location trails can expose a unit’s pattern of life and could help adversaries plan missile, drone and roadside-bomb attacks, as well as counterintelligence operations. Lawmakers said their attempts to get more information from military officials had been unsuccessful, and the Pentagon did not return requests for comment. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers also did not return emails seeking comment.

The concern reaches well beyond one theater. Location data is widely used in digital advertising, often collected from smartphones and apps before being sold to data brokers through layers of intermediaries. In one case as far back as 2016, a defense contractor reportedly used commercially available location data to track special operations forces from U.S. bases to Syria. More recently, journalists used brokered coordinates to show movement around 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., pressed the Defense Department to move faster. Their proposals included disabling advertising IDs on government-issued mobile devices, automatically turning off location-sharing services for deployed personnel and replacing browsers lawmakers say collect large amounts of user data. Harrigan said every day those browsers remain on government devices is another day adversaries are being handed a weapon against U.S. troops.

The threat is also being framed as a structural one. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Justin Sherman of Global Cyber Strategies said commercial data, real-time bidding networks, smartphones and advanced analytics have exploded over the last two decades, while foreign adversaries such as China and Russia are investing to exploit those vulnerabilities. The result is a civilian adtech market that increasingly looks like a defense exposure, with troop safety tied to rules far outside the Pentagon’s walls.