They have, of course, repeatedly assured us that this sort of intensive surveillance never happens and would never happen in the U.S.:

A data broker shared billions of “highly sensitive” phone-location records with the Washington D.C. government last year that revealed how people moved about the city, public records show.

Source: Data broker shared billions of phone location records with D.C. government as part of covid-tracking effort

Third party data brokers know they are questionable and sleazy, and their intent of providing data for “Covid tracking” was, they though, a good plan to make them look responsible. Oops.

How this works: numerous apps on your phone collect location data and then provide it, for a small reimbursement, to third party data brokers. Even if Google were not tracking and collecting this data, if you have apps on your phone that use location data, there is a good chance those apps are collecting this data anyway.

The data has been used to track whether or not a business is busy – such as after public health restrictions were put in place. In other words, it is part of our 24×7 surveillance society where everything we do is tracked in real time, and at some point, we may be held to account for having walked down the wrong street.

I have written numerous posts on my Coldstreams Business and Tech blog about smart phone tracking for Covid contact tracing – and found, since day one, that such applications were essentially useless.