(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) As many anticipated, big corporations in the United States collected data from the cell phones of Americans to track how complaint or non-compliant they were with COVID regulations during the lockdowns.
According to the recent revelation, the data was collected by voter analytics firm PredictWise, which harvested location data from millions of cell phones in the United States, assigning “COVID-19 decree violations” in order to determine how compliant one was as a subject, Reclaim the Net reported.
Those who ignored the absurd lockdowns were given high violation scores.
Part of the strategy was to flag “COVID concerned” Republicans, who were, and are, far more likely to vote for Democrats.
Specifically, they targeted 350,000 “COVID concerned” Republicans leading up to the 2020 election, sending them COVID-related political advertisements.
According to a PredictWise report, Democrats were able to use surveillance to “deploy this real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off” for Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who was running for the Senate at the time.
The company bragged extensively about its successful surveillance network.
“PredictWise understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with Covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown,” the company added.
According to PredictWise, it “tracks the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors” of over 260 million American voters.
Of course Americans should not be surprised by widespread data harvesting. Nations across the West have doubled-down on surveillance technology for decades.
Conservative MP Jeremy Hunt, who recently became Chancellor of the Exchequer, previously called for the British government to use its tracking and surveillance systems to enforce lockdowns in Britain.
“Daily contact with those asked to self-isolate – using GPS tracking to monitor compliance if necessary as happens in Taiwan and Poland,” said Hunt.
