Spyware next level... the spying is in the ads
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But all this data information doesn’t serve only advertisers. A few years ago, people discovered that data collected for advertising and commercial needs could also be used for other ends, and that these exchanges can also be used for geotracking, surveillance of our location. This is the little-known field of AdInt (ad intelligence). Its aim is to convert data and information collected for advertising purposes into intelligence. “In a certain sense, Google and Apple created an espionage market,” explains a person in the AdInt industry, referring to the two companies whose operating systems power most smartphones. “They just hoped that people wouldn’t understand that the information that advertisers collect can also be intelligence gold. Another way to think of it is that Apple and Google are themselves a type of espionage firm. There are simply some who know how to exploit that.” In light of its potential sensitivity, advertising information, especially information related to our smartphones, is supposed to be anonymous. Every smartphone has a unique advertising ID number, which ostensibly is impossible to crossmatch with our phone number or our name. The aim is clear: to prevent ad data from being used to spy on people, and not allow advertisers to exploit our private information. The European Union’s digital privacy law, known as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), prohibits this explicitly. But even anonymous information that is compliant with such privacy laws can be extremely valuable from an intelligence perspective. For example, with the aid of advertising technology, it’s possible to digitally mark all the cellphones belonging to people who passed through a particular airport at a specific time. This simple advertising tool can be used, for example, to conduct contact tracing and monitor infection chains during a pandemic. First, all the ad-IDs of devices that were in the airport are collected. That’s a simple operation: Each time we pick up our phone and open an app that displays ads, the phone transmits where we are to the advertisers in order to improve the effectiveness of the ads they send us. Mapping these identifiers creates a list of people who were in the airport at a certain time. The advertisers may not know the names of these people, but they can be profiled as part of a target audience – which can be continuously targeted. They are bombarded with ads, and through these ads, their dispersal across the world can be tracked.