Tens of millions of US citizens were given a "COVID-19 decree violation" score as a result of a data harvesting program conducted during the first lockdown by voter analytics firm PredictWise.

"These Covid-19 decree violation scores were calculated by analyzing nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings to get "real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns." People who were "on the go more often than their neighbors" were given a high Covid-19 decree violation score while those who mostly or always stayed at home were given a low Covid-19 decree violation score," writes Reclaim the Net's Tom Parker.

The data collected was then used by PredictWise to help Democrats target over 350,000 "COVID concerned" Republicans with campaign ads relating to virus prevention measures.

"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 states in its white paper.

This information was used to help identify 40,000 "persuasion targets" for Senate candidate Mark Kelly, who was subsequently elected.