Vice is reporting that the CDC purchased cellphone location data for a wide assortment of uses (under the umbrella of COVID-19). If true, this would be extremely disconcerting, as location data can often be correlated with extremely personal information, such as friendships, religious affiliations, political interests, and medical conditions (see [1-2]).
(Hat-tip CHD)
[1] T. Tiwari, A. Klausner, M. Andreev, A. Trachtenberg and A. Yerukhimovich, "Location Leakage from Network Access Patterns," 2019 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), 2019, pp. 214-222, doi: 10.1109/CNS.2019.8802847.
[2] Canetti, Ran, Ari Trachtenberg, and Mayank Varia. "Anonymous collocation discovery: Harnessing privacy to tame the coronavirus." arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.13670(2020).
So, the report is that there has been (no surprise, but good to have evidence) the deliberate gathering - PURCHASING - of info CDC has no right to. Am I understanding right?
I don't know whether they have a right to it - that's a legal matter. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed to collect it themselves (4th amendment), so, like other government agencies before them, they apparently skirt the law by simply purchasing the information from companies that are not bound by these limitations.
So, the report is that there has been (no surprise, but good to have evidence) the deliberate gathering - PURCHASING - of info CDC has no right to. Am I understanding right?
I don't know whether they have a right to it - that's a legal matter. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed to collect it themselves (4th amendment), so, like other government agencies before them, they apparently skirt the law by simply purchasing the information from companies that are not bound by these limitations.