The ads on your phone aren’t just trying to sell you sneakers or beauty products. They are a source of information for anyone who has the money to buy it — and sometimes, you don’t even need a fortune: a simple subscription is enough.
Police in Tucson, USA, caught a suspect in tobacco store robberies who was robbing the same chain of stores, with the help of a controversial tool.
Analyzing geolocation signals of all nearby cell phones at the time of each robbery, agents noticed a device that repeatedly appeared near the targeted stores, and followed the signal home from the device owner.
The cell phone belonged to someone who dated an employee of the first store that had been robbed.
Typically, catching the individual would require a warrant, a wiretapperhaps a court subpoena. In this case, all you needed to do was subscribe to a service.
The service, according to , is the Webloc, a surveillance product based on technology used in advertising shown on mobile devices, whose owners claim collect data from around 500 million cell phones across the planet.
Recently, says , a leak revealed a technical report that shows the how Webloc tracked a man in Abu Dhabi, 12 times a day — whenever the device communicated its position via GPS or connected to a Wi-Fi access point — and accurately located two other devices at specific points in Romania and Italy, at specific times.
Webloc was developed by and is now sold as a complementary module by the North American supplier, which absorbed Cobweb in a merger in 2023.
Penlink’s flagship product, Tangles, has already collects data from social networks and online accounts; the Webloc adds the ability to associate these identifiers furniture supposedly “anonymous” to specific people, in specific places — without a judge ever being aware of it.
The main issue that arises, however, is not the use of these tools by law enforcement agents to combat crime, without a judicial mandate — but the fact that anyone can spend a few tens of euros to access this type of information, violating the privacy of any ordinary citizen.
