US company's geolocation data transaction draws intense scrutiny in Germany

Reporting indicates that Datastream Group, via the Datarade marketplace, supplied 3.6 billion smartphone location records covering millions of Germans as a sample to a journalist; the dataset contained advertising IDs with coordinates and timestamps precise to the second and enabled the outlets to create movement profiles that identified national security and military personnel, exposing home addresses, travel patterns and visits to sensitive facilities and raising major privacy and national-security concerns under GDPR.