Ron Wyden

US military personnel deployed to war zones have reportedly been targeted through the use of commercially available location data, highlighting growing concerns over how private data markets are influencing modern warfare and national security.

According to a Reuters report, in a letter shared by US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, US Central Command (CENTCOM) acknowledged receiving “multiple threat reports” involving adversaries exploiting commercial location data to monitor or target American personnel operating in its area of responsibility.

While the military did not provide operational details, CENTCOM oversees strategic regions including the Persian Gulf, where tensions between US forces and Iran remain elevated, particularly around the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the report, the lawmakers described the revelation as the first official confirmation that commercially sourced location data has been used to target US troops in an active war zone.

In a bipartisan letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon, members of Congress warned that data harvested by the advertising technology industry could expose troop movements, operational patterns, and gathering points to hostile actors.

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where US troops congregate and their pattern of life,” the lawmakers wrote.

They cautioned that such information could assist adversaries in planning missile strikes, drone attacks, roadside bombings, or counterintelligence operations.

Wyden, a longtime critic of the data brokerage industry, said the incident highlighted the national security risks posed by the broader surveillance economy.

“It’s time to start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat,” Reuters quoted Wyden as saying in a statement.

Lawmakers also said military officials had declined to provide additional details about the reported incidents despite repeated inquiries.

Growing security concern

Commercial location data, widely used in digital advertising, has emerged as a growing national security concern as lawmakers warn it can expose sensitive military movements and operations.

The data is typically collected through smartphones and apps, then sold through a network of brokers and intermediaries that aggregate and resell users’ movements and behavioral patterns.

Privacy advocates have long warned about the risks of trading detailed location histories on the open market. In recent years, however, officials and researchers have increasingly raised alarms about its military and intelligence implications, reported Reuters.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, in 2016, a US defence contractor used commercially available location data to trace special operations personnel from bases in the United States to a sensitive staging area in Syria.

More recently, investigations by Wired and two German media outlets used billions of location coordinates obtained from a data broker to track movements around 11 US military and intelligence facilities in Germany.

According to Reuters, in the letter to the Pentagon, US lawmakers argued that military officials should have moved more aggressively to shield service members from digital surveillance risks. Suggested measures included disabling advertising IDs on government-issued devices, automatically turning off location-sharing features for troops in the field, and replacing Google Chrome with more privacy-focused browsers.

Among the lawmakers was Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican and former US Army Special Forces officer.

Harrigan said browsers like Chrome “are built from the ground up to collect and share user data” and warned that every day they remain on military devices “is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops.”

In a statement, Alphabet’s Google said that Chrome had “industry leading security.”

The company added that it had “long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers.”

With inputs from agencies