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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[–] 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?