CDC Used Phone Location Data For COVID Research

U. S. health officials purchased data last year tracking the cellphones of millions of Americans to study personal behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic — raising concern among privacy advocates, one of whom called the possible use of that information to review tribal health policies, among other purposes, "a bit shocking. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed in April 2021 to buy the so-called mobility data from information broker SafeGraph for April 2021 to April 2022, after that dataset had been available to researchers at no cost since the start of the pandemic, according to Jasmine Reed, a spokeswoman for the agency. Reed said Tuesday.

Article continues at https://www.law360.com/articles/1489646/cdc-used-phone-location-data-for... also see https://nypost.com/2022/05/04/cdc-bought-cell-phone-data-to-track-lockdo...