EU officials' location data, put up for sale on the internet. The European Commission is on alert following a new security breach.

Journalists from several European publications have discovered how easily high-ranking EU officials can be spied on using location history obtained commercially and sold by data brokers, despite the fact that European countries have some of the strictest data protection laws in the world.

A coalition of reporters from L’Echo, Le Monde, Netzpolitik.org, and BNR nieuwsradio obtained a data set, offered as a free sample from a data broker, which contains 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people in Belgium. A large portion of the location data is uploaded by regular apps installed on a person’s phone, which is sold to data brokers. These data brokers then sell this data to governments and the military.

The data set also included the location history of high-ranking European officials, including those working directly for the European Commission.

The reporters stated that they were able to identify hundreds of devices belonging to people working in sensitive areas of the EU, including 2,000 location markers from the devices of 264 officials and approximately 5,800 location markers from over 750 devices in the European Parliament.

Three high-ranking officials working for the EU were identified in an investigation into phone location data sold by data brokers. Other phones were located in NATO sites and Belgian military bases.

Details, HERE

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EU officials’ location data, put up for sale on the internet. The European Commission is on alert following a new security breach.

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