A liberal advocacy group is under fire after using cellphone data to track the movements of anti-lockdown protesters, then passing on that data to left-wing journalists.
Privacy supporters are raising the alarm after a British newspaper, the Guardian, says a Democrat-linked group gave their publication “anonymized” data pinpointing the location of protesters, many of whom are conservatives. The article states the protests are potentially spreading COVID-19, not mentioning during many events protesters stayed in their cars. The Cato Institute’s Matthew Feeney covers privacy issues in light of emerging technologies.
“My concerns there are one this information is pretty revealing even if it’s useful. And secondly, history unfortunately is full of examples of surveillance technology sticking around past when it was supposed to be deployed,” Feeney said.
The group that provided the data, the Committee to Protect Medicare, did not reveal all the protests it tracked, other than one in Denver on April 19. According to the report, the group acquired the data via third party apps.