American soldiers in the Gulf are being hunted – and the weapon Iran is using comes from Silicon Valley.
The Pentagon knew this was happening and said nothing.
What just got confirmed is the kind of thing that should end careers and start investigations.
Iran Used Commercial Location Data to Target US Troops in Active War Zone
U.S. Central Command confirmed in a letter that it had "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater."
The Persian Gulf is CENTCOM's theater. That's where American forces are fighting an active shooting war against Iran right now.
The Pentagon did not release that letter. Senator Ron Wyden pried it loose and handed it to Reuters.
Apps on military-issued smartphones collect location data and sell it to brokers who resell it to anyone with money. Iran doesn't need to hack a classified network to know where soldiers sleep and patrol. It can buy that information for pennies on the open market.
Representative Pat Harrigan – a North Carolina Republican and former Army Special Forces officer – said Google’s Chrome browser and apps like it are "built from the ground up to collect and share user data."
Every day they stay on government-issued devices, Harrigan warned, "is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops."
Google's response: Chrome has "industry leading security."
Soldiers are taking missiles and drones in the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM conducted self-defense strikes against Iranian launch sites this week.
Through all of it, the location data generated by every smartphone on every base has been flowing out through advertising networks and into enemy hands.
Pentagon Ignored Years of Warnings About Data Brokers and Military Surveillance
This didn't come out of nowhere.
In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor used commercially purchased location data to track Special Operations Forces from their stateside bases all the way to a classified staging area in Syria. The Wall Street Journal reported it. The Pentagon noted it and moved on.
Journalists later mapped the precise daily movements of personnel at 11 U.S. military and intelligence sites in Germany – using billions of location coordinates bought from a data broker. Published. Documented. Ignored.
Duke University researchers confirmed that data brokers were selling sensitive records on active-duty servicemembers for as little as 12 cents per record.
Congress tried. Senators Rubio and Cassidy introduced legislation in 2022 to block data brokers from selling military data to China, Russia, and Iran. A version passed in 2024.
The underlying market kept running because the loopholes stayed open. The Pentagon kept putting Chrome on soldiers' phones.
Lawmakers are now demanding the obvious – disable the advertising ID on military-issued devices, kill location sharing in the field, move personnel off Chrome. Steps that should have happened before the first shot was fired.
How Google Chrome and Data Brokers Became a National Security Threat
Nobody at Google or in the data broker industry set out to help Iran kill Americans. They built a system that sells location data to anyone who pays – and never asked what anyone planned to do with it.
The result is identical.
Iran doesn't need spies embedded on American bases. It doesn't need satellites or signal intercepts. It needs a credit card and an internet connection. The same infrastructure that tells advertisers you browsed for running shoes is telling Iran's military planners where American troops eat breakfast.
The data broker industry operates entirely legally.
Congress spent four years passing partial fixes. The Pentagon spent four years receiving warnings and filing them. American soldiers spent that same time carrying a GPS beacon their own government refused to turn off – while fighting a war against the country buying the signal.
Big Tech got paid, Iran got the data, and the troops got targeted.
Sources:
- Raphael Satter, "Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data," Reuters, May 28, 2026.
- Justin Sherman et al., "Data Brokers and the Sale of Data on U.S. Military Personnel," Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, November 2023.
- "Cassidy Introduced Bill to Further Protect Military Servicemembers' Data," Office of Senator Bill Cassidy, April 29, 2025.
- "US forces conducted self-defense strikes in southern Iran," CNN, May 25–26, 2026.
