If you thought Covid-19 was used as an excuse to let the government monitor your every move, you may just be right. Vice reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) purchased tracking data from the cellphones of millions of Americans to use for analysis of Covid-19-related trends — but also for purposes extending far beyond the pandemic such as determining whether people are getting sufficient exercise or experiencing violence.
According to CDC documents that Vice obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, last year the agency entered into a contract with controversial data broker SafeGraph, paying the company $420,000 for access to one year’s worth of cellphone location data “derived from at least 20 million active cellphone users per day across the United States.” The contract’s expiration date was March 31, 2021.
