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

 

According to the article, Vice’s FOIA request uncovered that the CDC paid controversial data broker SafeGraph $420,000 last year for access to a year of Americans’ “anonymized” cell phone location data. 

The documents “show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.” 

SafeGraph’s cellular location data tracks where people live, work, and shows wherever they go. It also, for example, supplied the cell phone data used to create Dinesh D’Souza’s upcoming movie about voter fraud, “2000 Mules.” 

While the CDC initially said it “urgently” needed the expedited data for pandemic tracking, such as checking how well people complied with lockdown orders and curfews, and how often they visited vaccinated sites, the documents obtained by Vice showed at least 21 OTHER ways the CDC wanted to use the data, including “tracking patterns of those visiting K-12 schools by the school,” “visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses,” “population migration,” and bizarrely, “examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”