Every Step You Take

Every Move You Make, Big Data Is Watching You

-by Jerrad Christian

Every morning you make the same moves— coffee in hand, drive to work, go to lunch, drive the same route home

Now picture every one of those steps tracked, stored, and sold. Not by enemy agents or some shadowy foreign government but by your own phone, the apps you use, and a dirty data market that doesn’t care who you are— only what you’re worth on the open market. I’m talking about the ad-tech industry turning your life into a product and selling it to anyone with the cash.

A Florida data broker called Datastream Group was caught moving 3.6 billion location points tied to 11 million mobile ad IDs of U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Germany. One entire month’s worth of data. Their source: a Lithuanian ad-tech outfit named Eskimi. Datastream says it bought the information “legitimately from a respected third-party provider.” Eskimi says they had nothing to do with it. Nobody’s showing contracts or producing receipts. This is the new normal.

This is a direct breach of operational security. It’s more dangerous than Pete Hegseth on a bender, drunk dialing his old girlfriends to brag about who he’s planning to bomb next. The coordinates show entries and exits from the U.S. Army’s European HQ near Wiesbaden, suspected NSA surveillance sites, drone-operational air bases, training grounds for Ukrainian forces, and facilities near suspected nuclear storage. The patterns follow troops from kitchens to classified bunkers, every day, without a break. The only people winning are the ones making money from it. The people losing are us, service members, their families, and anyone connected to those locations.

This isn’t even an isolated mess. Real-Time Bidding— RTB— sprays sensitive data to dozens of bidders every time an ad loads. Location. App activity. Religious affiliation. Medical conditions. All moving through the system in milliseconds like bulk freight on an open dock. The FTC has tried to clamp down on some of the worst players— Mobilewalla, Gravy Analytics, and others— banning the sale of data from military bases, hospitals, churches, or protests. But, it hasn’t made a dent. Google says it forbids ad segments like “national security decision makers,” but those categories still exist inside its DV360 platform, ready for anyone with the right credentials (read money).

The fix isn’t complicated. Kill the pipelines that move this kind of data and make doing it a felony. Strip RTB trackers from every app in use. Enforce strict limits on what’s collected and dump anything that isn’t necessary. Push this warning through every command channel until it’s standard knowledge. Because this isn't a theory anymore. It’s the trail we leave every time we grab that morning coffee, say hello to our friends at work, or walk through the door of your favorite lunch spot. That trail is being packaged, sold, and passed around. The people responsible stay hidden and our government does nothing to ensure everyday citizens are safe.

We must drag the brokers into the open, shut down their operations, and write data protection laws for Americans that actually have teeth (and use them). Until that happens, our movements are inventory for sale to whoever wants it and can drop the money.

All of these brokers are depending on the folks that “have nothing to hide” or hoping we’ll all get used to it. I’ve got nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stand by while I’m sold off in pieces. The question is— will you?