"Anonymous" is a thing of the past: advertising becomes surveillance
What is sold as harmless app tracking turns out to be a powerful surveillance tool: companies that access advertising data can identify and track people worldwide – with frightening precision. netzpolitik.org reports, referring to research by the French newspaper Le Monde, which shows how ADINT companies—i.e., providers of "advertising intelligence"—openly offer their services to European authorities. And they promise a lot: "Every device. Anytime. Anywhere."
The industry operates behind the scenes, collecting location data via everyday apps—weather services, games, social media—and transforming it into profiles with real recognition value. The central component: advertising IDs, i.e., unique identifiers that every smartphone sends automatically. This data is then enriched with time and location stamps, stored on servers, and systematically evaluated—without users noticing or consenting.
The trail of data: From apps to intelligence agencies
Anyone who thinks that advertising data is only used for annoying pop-ups is mistaken. According to Le Monde, there are at least 15 international companies—including some from Israel, Italy, and the US—that use such data to create entire movement profiles. The trick here is that the supposedly "anonymous" IDs can be clearly assigned to individual persons with the help of additional information. This turns a random sequence of numbers into a real person with a location, routines, and social contacts.
One Italian provider even claims to be able to deanonymize 95 percent of all smartphones in Italy using this technology. Names such as Penlink, Rayzone, Wave Guard, and Cognyte are mentioned in this context—all companies that actively participate in trade fairs and sell their services to intelligence agencies, police authorities, and private companies.
From border controls to bank security – everything is a target
The areas of application? Complex—and no less problematic. Presentations to authorities have shown, among other things, how cell phones can be scanned at border crossings to identify devices that appear regularly. The idea behind this is to identify smugglers and migrants before they are even questioned. According to the report, this data is also used in the financial sector—for example, for "fraud prevention" at banks.
It is well known that such methods have long been in use in the US. There, too, the immigration authority ICE uses ADINT data to track down specific individuals. Whether German authorities also have access to such services remains unclear, as the federal government refuses to respond to parliamentary inquiries.
Comment: Tracking for advertising? Or for control?
What has been uncovered here is more than a technical loophole—it is a digital surveillance network that makes each and every one of us potentially traceable. The key point is that the data does not come from intelligence agencies or hacker attacks, but directly from the advertising industry. And while millions of people use their smartphones every day, silent data streams are working in the background—completely legally and systematically.
The fact that authorities and companies are examining or even using such offers poses a clear threat to data protection and privacy. The "anonymous advertising ID" is a fairy tale—at least when the technology behind it promises to recognize and locate people in real time.
And politicians? They remain silent or shrug their shoulders. Yet now would be precisely the right moment not only to question this type of surveillance, but to ban it altogether. Anyone who turns advertising tracking into state espionage has long since lost control—it's just that not everyone has noticed (yet).
Source: netzpolitik.org
