This happens with domestic law enforcement as well. During the lockdown there were several articles about federal agencies relying on private companies for location data.
It says something that both the military and federal government have been outmatched in their tracking abilities by silicon valley.
I wouldn't assume that's unintentional. The Feds probably love having that level of indirection built in. Eases warrent requirements, and you don't get news headlines about government trackers in your devices.
I used to work for a company that sold location tracking data. It was amazing how cheap this data is and how many sources you can collect it from. We would buy data from 3rd party sources and often have our own data sold back to us, sometimes straight up, and sometimes after randomization added to avoid exact matches. We had a whole system built to compare incoming data against our own data to make sure that we weren't having too much of our own data being sold to us.
why waste resources when people -voluntarily- give their info up? It would make no logical sense.
If the damn thing is free, you're the product :/
I take a more extreme view. My confidence that it is absolutely intentional and that significant planning went in to arrive at this point is in the region of 99%.
They're not even remotely close to outmatched. The difference is the IC and the military can't collect intelligence inside of the United States. They're perfectly well allowed to use commercial and public data, though.
So all the military, government, police, medical, utility, CEO, infrastructure, and other people also have their location data in these databases. How do they all feel about this?