Newly released documents showed the CDC planned to use phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes too.

….

“The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor to neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)

….

  • “Track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools by the school and compare to 2019; compare with epi metrics [Environmental Performance Index] if possible.”
  • “Examination of the correlation of mobility patterns data and rise in COVID-19 cases […] Movement restrictions (Border closures, inter-regional and nigh curfews) to show compliance.”
  • “Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”

Source: CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

The CDC needs to be relocated to China – they’d fit right in there.

“1984” was a warning, not a “how-to instruction” guide.

Update: SafeGraph, the 3rd party that sold the data, announced it will no longer sell location data on abortion providers. What could have possibly gone wrong?

“the data showed where groups of people visiting those facilities came from, the duration of their visits and where they traveled afterward, according to the Vice Motherboard article.”

I may go back to turning my phone off while traveling. Surveillance is the primary business model of the Internet.

SafeGraph says it only provides data, primarily, for Covid-19 tracking – on the hypothetical idea that this will be used to reduce Covid-19 spread. They cite CDC studies claiming their mitigations work (ALWAYS check the start and end point of CDC data studies – ALWAYS). Reminder – about 2/3ds of everyone in the U.S. has now had Covid, strongly suggesting the mitigations had little to no impact.

Funny – once while traveling in Nevada, we had headed down the wrong road at the edge of a city. Looking for a place to turn around, we saw a sign saying “Industrial area” and we turned left onto a road or long driveway, and turned around in a parking lot. Of a brothel! We had no idea. Besides cellphone tracking, I also had on my amateur radio APRS tracking system, logging my location in a publicly readable cloud database. Well, that could be awkward!

Coldstreams