It must be a day that ends in y: Another conspiracy theory that was true all along

Rofl. Where is that singing disinformation witch when you need her?


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.

By Joseph Cox

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also 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.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June. 

The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-location-data-curfews

5 thoughts on “It must be a day that ends in y: Another conspiracy theory that was true all along”

  1. Just wow. And, although I turn off my phone, I think I read it transmits somehow anyway?
    And, as for that singing disinformation lady — she is no more a citizen than I am or anyone else is. It would be helpful for some of these people in such positions to remind themselves of that.

  2. Good reason to leave phone at home! We lived rich and happy lives before cell phones were invented. Perhaps time to rediscover that.

  3. I read the only way to beat this was remove the battery from your phone. On old flip phones you could.

    1. Even if you remove your battery the base band can still transmit. I took a class put on by a former army infantry scout with regards to radios and signals intelligence.
      Even flip phones if they still work can be a precise tracking mechanism. All the major carriers are moving to deactivate their third generation networks. So you will be stuck only with a fourth generation or higher phone.
      There are only two ways to get around this. One you remove the antenna which will probably destroy your phone or two you put your phone in a faraday bag. Even that is not full proof. One of the guys I knew a class said his phone turned on in his faraday bag on its own volition and had set a timer. If you take your antenna out or you put it in a faraday bag you have just created an anomaly that tracking systems will notice. The guy that put on the class said that when he was in Afghanistan they were using artificial intelligence to track all cell phones in their area. When an anomaly happened, it was flagged for a human intelligence analyst to take a look at. This was back in 2013 or so. He also said that they mined social media like crazy in order to find out who was who and take them out as needed

      1. Thanks, UPCG, for that information, and thanks, Susan for suggesting something you thought might work. It sounds like the only solution is not having a cell phone or leaving it at home.
        I saw a video about trying to reduce emails being read by other entities. My take away ( which could have been a misunderstanding) was it’s almost just as well to “hide in plain sight “ using something like gmail because using proton mail, etc, makes you likely to get “eyes” put on you, just as USCG mentioned above about procedures in Afghanistan.
        Someone on another site mentioned possibly tweaking the algorithms by visiting liberal sites, maybe switching phones with other family members to disrupt patterns, etc. I have no idea if that would work.

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