this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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U.S. forces deployed to war zones have been targeted using commercially available location data (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 day ago by KatherinaReichelt@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 11 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Nothing will be done about it.

Actually, if they do anything, they'll probably just ban personal phones entirely and lock down issued devices. Because that's the easiest solution instead of dealing with the root cause.

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

It's even included in the article:

The letter from ​U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, ​they should have acted ⁠faster to protect their personnel, for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google's Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.

One of the letter's cosigners was U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican who was formerly ⁠a U.S. Army ​Special Forces officer. Harrigan said that browsers like Chrome "are built from the ground up to ​collect and share user data" and that every day they remain on government-issued devices "is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops."

And what about the rest of the population?

[–] count_duckula@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 15 hours ago

You are absolutely correct, that is exactly what will happen, if at all. Even for a country that loves its military as much as America, they probably love their surveillance techbros even more.