Israeli company enables surveillance through advertising data
The advertising industry collects real-time data from you as a user every time you use an app or visit a website. This includes real-time location, browsing behavior and more. However, this data is anonymized, so it cannot be linked to the names of individuals.
However, a company from Israel offers a service called Echo that uses this data to monitor people, writes Bloomberg. The company then sells this service to governments, who can use it to monitor their citizens.
The product is not officially advertised on Rayzone’s website, but Bloomberg has spoken to insiders. Accordingly, governments spend up to ten million US dollars on the product.
Now, of course, the question is how the data can be used for surveillance at all if they are anonymized. According to Rayzone’s marketing materials, the company can identify people by matching ad tracking data with data from other databases.
In this way, governments always get the current location and lots of other information about their citizens at the touch of a button. The company also writes that it collects information from every internet user worldwide.
The targets of this data collection are not aware that their data is being tracked, nor can they avoid it. Data includes details such as name, gender, age, address, hobbies and more.
At a conference in Tel Aviv, Guy Mizrahi, Rayzone’s former Chief Cyber Security Officer, said: “I want to say that as a private individual I would like my government to be able to spy on people, even me, if they think I’m doing something wrong have made.”
He went on to say: “Other countries should also have these skills and not all of them can develop them on their own. So if we can sell stuff like that and help them with that, that’s great.”
According to Bloomberg, Echo has been in development since 2017 and the company has been selling the service since at least 2018. However, it is not known which governments use Echo and for what purposes.
