Companies are offering law enforcement agencies the ability to track smartphone users through advertising data gathered on their devices. Le Monde attended confidential presentations of these new surveillance tools to learn more.
By Martin UntersingerPublished today at 4:00 am (Paris)
•5 min read•Lire en français
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In 2017, a senior French investigator returning from Milipol, the major biennial trade fair dedicated to state security, had something to confide. Shocked, he informed us he had been approached on the sidelines of the event by “an Israeli company,” whose name he did not wish to disclose, that tried to sell him a geolocation tool using advertising data collected from mobile phones.
Nearly a decade later, what once seemed like science fiction now drives a well-established industry. Today, companies offer services in advertising intelligence (Adint): By collecting the geolocation data of millions of phones worldwide from advertising markets, they promise intelligence or law enforcement agencies the ability to track individuals to within a few meters.
According to Le Monde‘s analysis, around 15 companies, at least, now propose such services. Most are based in Israel and were founded by former members of the country’s intelligence services or military. Others are based in Europe and the United States. Their raw material is the advertising data exchanged and resold on online marketplaces, collected by thousands of ordinary apps, such as games or weather apps, supposedly for advertising purposes.
Data updated in real time
Adint tools are in increasing demand. More and more companies in the sector have started showcasing them at industry trade shows and specialized conferences. According to US business magazine Forbes, US immigration police ICE recently purchased an Adint tool for $5 million (€4.3 million). Such tools have been viewed and promoted as alternatives to other tracking methods, which are either more cumbersome or increasingly ineffective. However, Adint surveillance tools, which operate under lax or even nonexistent regulation, raise major concerns about personal freedoms, since any country or institution can use them against any phone anywhere in the world.
Companies dealing in Adint tools, like the entire surveillance industry, thrive in secrecy. However, in recent months, Le Monde managed to attend several confidential demonstrations of the tools for law enforcement agencies.
On paper, Adint tools seem like an investigator’s dream come true. Sales representatives of the Italian surveillance conglomerate RCS market the Adint solution Ubiqo as being able to track phones almost in real time, going back as far as 10 years, invisibly and requiring “no collaboration with telecommunication operators.”
In a presentation attended by Le Monde, sales representatives from industry leader Penlink, an American company whose Adint tool is of Israeli origin, boasted of collecting data from every country in the world back to 2019. According to one representative, the data was updated almost in real time, ranging from every two minutes to every 24 hours. In a document obtained by Le Monde, Wave Guard Technologies, another Israeli company, promoted its AdVantage platform as offering “real-time target monitoring worldwide.” The company’s slogan sums it up: “any device, any time, anywhere.”
True identities
In another private presentation, a sales representative from Rayzone, which has been offering Adint tools since 2017, demonstrated how these tools could be used to combat illegal immigration. By collecting advertising IDs at several known transit points for refugees, investigators should be able to identify phones that regularly visit those places, thereby identifying the phones of smugglers. “We are always collecting data. It means we can go back in time to uncover more suspects,” a company sales representative told a group of law enforcement officials. “Our product is only sold to law enforcement and can only be used for the specific purposes of crime and terror prevention,” Rayzone told Le Monde in response to our questions. “We follow a very restrictive and strict process before the sales. We assess the customer to know exactly to whom we are selling the product.”
The data handled by these companies is supposed to be anonymous, tied to an advertising identifier made up of a string of letters and numbers. However, almost all companies offer customers the ability to de-anonymize the data. Le Monde attended a presentation during which RCS sales representatives claimed they were able to link advertising identifiers to real identities and had done so on a nationwide scale by de-anonymizing 95% of Italian mobile devices. When contacted, the company said it “firmly denies” having done so. RCS said its “products and services are provided to law enforcement agencies to support the prevention and investigation of serious crimes such as acts of terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime, child abuse, corruption, etc.” It assured it worked “in compliance with both national and European rules and regulations.”
Read more Subscribers only How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data
Other companies made the same promise. At its booth at the 2025 Milipol trade show, Wave Guard Technologies promoted an “Adint de-anonymization platform.” Rayzone and Cognyte, another company in the sector, also made the same promises to law enforcement agencies. Their claims were all the more credible because the companies, or their customers, could cross-reference data sets with other information. For example, Penlink told investigators its system could match advertising identifiers and location data with addresses and names from databases that had been hacked and leaked on the internet.
Such demonstrations made a strong impression on their target audience. “I was amazed,” said a magistrate after a presentation by an Adint company. Reactions of this kind explain why some clients do not hesitate to pay bills that could reach several million euros a year for Adint services. This is particularly true for dozens of agencies or authorities in the US, where the use of these tools has become widespread in recent years.
Not always reliable data
Do these companies sell their tools exclusively to governments, or do they provide them to businesses, as well? In the document obtained by Le Monde, Wave Guard Technologies stated that its Adint platform equips “financial institutions for enhanced security and fraud prevention.” The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Is this surveillance industry legal? Some Adint vendors exempted themselves from responsibility by claiming to be mere “pipelines” supplying law enforcement agencies with data. Others sought cover behind the consent users give when they accept the terms of use of applications that collect their geolocations. “When you click ‘I accept,’ you’re willingly sharing data with us,” bluntly summed up a salesperson from an Israeli company selling an Adint solution during a demonstration we attended. However, European law prohibits the use of personal data collected for advertising purposes for any other use without consent.
Read more Subscribers only Geolocated advertising data can be used to track EU officials, even to their homes
That is not the only problem with these products. Behind the glossy surface of commercial presentations, the reality is that the tools are not always reliable. During a presentation attended by Le Monde, a salesperson from an Israeli company admitted that “80% to 85%” of the data he collects is unusable, particularly due to missing or inaccurate geolocation data.
Industry players also tended to exaggerate the proportion of phones for which they managed to obtain geolocation data. Not all smartphone owners use applications whose data feeds advertising markets and Adint vendors. Ultimately, “10% or 15% of phones in circulation worldwide” are traceable, according to a European source who had closely studied Adint vendor offerings.
Lax regulation
The use of Adint data in criminal investigations, which require a high degree of reliability and completeness, appears marginal. Adint tools seem more promising for intelligence agencies. “It makes it possible to detect trends, weak signals and flows,” the source continued, explaining that it was possible for a counter-espionage agency to obtain a list of phones that had been present inside a given embassy over the past 12 months.
Despite that, these tools remain attractive to law enforcement agencies. The regulations concerning them are much less stringent than those for other surveillance tools, such as spyware. On the grounds that the data they offered was commercially available, Israeli companies have so far been able to freely export them without needing the Ministry of Defense’s approval. Some companies, however, were overzealous and requested authorization anyway, according to an Israeli industry source.
Adint tools, however, are not entirely separate from the spyware market. French authorities recently raised concerns after observing that some Adint companies have gone beyond merely collecting profiling or geolocation data and have started distributing malicious ads in order to install spyware on phones.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.
