The Pentagon has confirmed that adversaries are exploiting commercially available phone location data to target US military personnel in active war zones. US Central Command (Centcom) reported multiple threat incidents involving the use of such data to surveil or target American forces, marking the first official acknowledgment of this risk in a conflict zone.
Senator Ron Wyden, who shared the Centcom message with Reuters, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers warned that location data can reveal troop concentrations and patterns of life, enabling attacks with missiles, drones, or roadside bombs. Wyden called for treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.
The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment, and lawmakers have struggled to obtain further details from military officials. The issue underscores privacy concerns around location data, which is collected from smartphones by apps and sold through brokers.
Previous reports have highlighted similar risks. In 2016, a defence contractor used commercial location data to track special operations forces from domestic bases to a staging post in Syria. More recently, journalists used data from a broker to expose movements at US military and intelligence sites in Germany.
Lawmakers urged the Pentagon to disable advertising IDs on military devices, turn off location sharing on field smartphones, and switch from Google Chrome to privacy-focused browsers. Representative Pat Harrigan, a former Special Forces officer, said Chrome is designed to collect user data, while Google defended the browser's security and called for stronger data broker safeguards.
