“Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.”
Babel Street’s LocateX lets a customer draw a polygon on a map and watch every phone that went in and out. Atlas’s investigator used a free trial to find the home addresses and daily movements of New Jersey police officers. The service is supposedly government only, and the salesperson admitted “they don’t actually check.” Every app that broadcasts your ad ID to hundreds of bidders built this machine.