European Union officials vulnerable to location tracking despite strong data protection laws

According to TechCrunch, European Union officials were found to be vulnerable to spying through commercially obtained location histories, raising concerns about data privacy despite stringent data protection laws in Europe. A coalition of journalists discovered that data brokers were selling location data obtained from mobile phones, including those of top EU officials. The dataset, containing millions of location data points, was freely available and included detailed location histories of officials working in sensitive areas within the European Commission and the European Parliament. This breach highlights the risks posed by the trade of personal data to governments and militaries. Despite Europe's robust data protection regulations like GDPR, the slow response from watchdogs and officials in enforcing against data brokers has allowed the billion-dollar industry of data brokering to flourish. To mitigate location tracking risks, individuals can anonymize device identifiers or regularly reset them. Source: TechCrunch