How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
I once met a disgruntled former employee of a company that competed against UberMedia and PlaceIQ. He had absconded with several gigabytes of data from his former company. It was only a small sampling of data, but it represented the comprehensive movements of tens of thousands of people for a few weeks. Lots of those people could be traced back to
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Other governments’ intelligence agencies have access to this data as well. Several Israeli companies—Insanet, Patternz, and Rayzone—have built similar tools to VISR and sell it to national security and public safety entities around the world, according to reports. Rayzone has even developed the capability to deliver malware through targeted ads, ac
... See moreByron Tau • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.
Byron Tau • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
There are some limits and safeguards on all this data. Technically, a user can reset their assigned advertising ID number (though few people do so—or even know they have one). And users do have some control over what they share, via their app settings. If consumers don’t allow the app they’re using to access GPS, the ad exchange can’t pull the phon
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