五角大楼在近十年来已被自身承包商、分析师与情报机构多次警告：仅靠商业定位资料，就能用信用卡购得美军人员的睡眠、工作与核武器存放地图。如今，美国中央司令部（US Central Command）已确认收到「多起威胁报告」，指称对手正在利用商业定位资料在战区追踪或监视美军人员；这也是官方首次承认，资料经纪人经济正被用来猎捕美军。
早在2016年，Fort Bragg与MacDill Air Force Base的示范就显示，无需骇入、只要购买资料，就能追踪手机沿著Turkey进入叙利亚北部，锁定秘密前进作战基地。之后，Defense Intelligence Agency于2021年告知国会其可在无令状下使用商购手机定位资料；2023年Duke University研究团队以每笔低至12 cents，购得现役官兵姓名、住址、健康与财务资讯，甚至可地理围栏至Fort Bragg、Quantico等基地；2024年WIRED又发现3.6 billion个座标、约1,100万支手机的资料中，包含12,313台曾经过至少11个美国设施的装置。
近期研究与国会反应都指向同一结论：Army Cyber Institute在2025年5月发现，陆军本土非机密网路上最常造访的网站中，超过1/5是商业追踪器，且修补所需资源极少；14名两党议员随后要求停用军用手机的广告ID、移除Chrome并让官兵加入资料经纪人退出系统。信中还指出，Centcom直到本月才部署关闭政府智慧手机定位分享的功能，约比最早警告晚了10年；同时，Army却要求官兵用私人手机处理公务，而这些手机正会向资料经纪人与广告生态回传ID与定位。
For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies that commercially available location data could reveal where US troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. US Central Command has now confirmed receiving multiple threat reports saying adversaries are using commercial location data to track or surveil US personnel in theater, marking the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces.
The pattern dates back to 2016, when a demonstration at Fort Bragg and MacDill Air Force Base showed that bought, not hacked, location data could follow phones through Turkey into northern Syria and expose a covert forward operating base. Later, the Defense Intelligence Agency said in 2021 it was using commercially purchased phone location data without a warrant; in 2023, Duke University researchers bought active-duty data for as little as 12 cents per record and found thousands of military-personnel listings, while a 2024 WIRED investigation found 3.6 billion coordinates linked to about 11 million phones in Germany, including 12,313 devices that passed through at least 11 US installations.
Recent research and congressional pressure point to the same failure to adopt cheap fixes. In May 2025, the Army Cyber Institute found that more than one-fifth of the most-visited web domains on the Army's stateside unclassified networks were commercial trackers, and that the remedies required minimal funding or resources. A bipartisan letter from 14 lawmakers now urges the Pentagon to disable advertising IDs on military phones, remove Chrome, and enroll service members in data-broker opt-out systems; it also notes that Centcom only rolled out the ability to switch off location sharing on government smartphones this month, roughly 10 years after the first warning, even as the Army tells soldiers to use their personal phones for government work.