Phone location data of top EU officials for sale, report finds

Phone location data of top EU officials for sale, report finds, reports DataBreaches[.]Net on 5 November 2025, revealing that journalists in Europe found it easy to spy on senior officials using commercially obtained location histories sold by data brokers. The coverage notes that EU officials are concerned about the trade of citizen and officials’ mobile data and have issued new staff guidance to counter tracking, according to Netzpolitik.

A coalition of reporters obtained a dataset offered as a free sample from a data broker, containing 278 million location data points from phones around Belgium, with much of the data uploaded by ordinary apps and then sold to data brokers. Those brokers subsequently sell the data to governments and militaries, the article states. The dataset also included the granular location histories of Europe’s top officials, including those who work directly for the European Commission in Brussels. Read more at TechCrunch.