US lawmakers Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Pat Harrigan have requested a Defense Department Inspector General investigation into why US military personnel can still be tracked via commercially purchased location data, despite measures taken to address the issue. While several military branches have disabled advertising identifiers on government-issued devices, location data tied to troops continues to be available, possibly due to delayed implementation, the insufficiency of disabling ad IDs alone, or data leaking from personal devices of personnel and contractors. Security researchers warn that adversarial nations like Russia and China may have been accessing this data through programmatic advertising auctions, posing a significant threat to military personnel, particularly those in combat zones.
