European journalists just exposed a massive security breach that makes GDPR look like paper armor. Data brokers are openly selling detailed location histories of top EU officials, including European Commission staff, despite Europe's supposedly bulletproof privacy laws. The investigation reveals how easy it is to track the continent's most sensitive government workers through commercially available datasets.
The headlines write themselves: Europe's top privacy watchdog just got caught with its digital pants down. A coalition of European journalists obtained a data broker's sample dataset containing 278 million location points from Belgium alone - and buried inside were the precise movements of hundreds of EU officials who craft the world's strictest data protection laws.
The investigation by Netzpolitik reads like a cybersecurity thriller. Reporters identified 2,000 location markers from 264 officials' devices working directly for the European Commission in Brussels. They tracked another 5,800 markers from over 750 devices in the European Parliament. All of this data was sitting in what data brokers call a "free sample" - the appetizer before the main course of commercial surveillance.
Here's the kicker: most of this tracking happens through ordinary smartphone apps that users willingly download. Those fitness trackers, weather apps, and mobile games? They're quietly harvesting location data and feeding it to brokers who then sell it to governments and militaries. It's a billion-dollar industry built on the digital breadcrumbs we scatter every day.
EU officials are reportedly "concerned" about this trade in their personal movements - which feels like calling the Titanic's situation "a bit damp." The European Commission has issued new guidance to staff about countering location tracking, but that's essentially asking people to solve a systemic problem with individual action.
The irony cuts deep. Europe's GDPR was supposed to be the gold standard for data protection, complete with massive fines that could theoretically bankrupt tech giants. But as the Netzpolitik investigation shows, enforcement against data brokers has been sluggish at best. These companies operate in a regulatory gray zone, buying and selling location data while privacy watchdogs struggle to keep pace.
This isn't the data broker industry's first rodeo with exposure. Last year, Gravy Analytics suffered a breach that spilled location records for tens of millions of people. Researchers examining that data found it detailed where people lived, worked, and spent their time - creating comprehensive surveillance profiles of ordinary citizens.
