The Invisible Eyes: How Popular Apps Fuel a Global Surveillance Network
In today’s world, where technology has reached an advanced level of development, the issue of global surveillance becomes particularly pressing. According to an investigation by 404 Media, hundreds of thousands of popular applications are part of a global surveillance network linked to the advertising industry. These applications use advertising to create user profiles, tracking private and personal information.
A key tool in this system is the spying tool Patternz, which turns users’ smartphones into virtual tracking devices. Patternz enables notifications about a user’s arrival at a certain location or their meeting with others. Approximately 90 TB of data is processed daily through Patternz, creating profiles for more than 5 billion users, whose data is obtained from a large number of companies, including Google and X.
The investigation also revealed that about 600,000 applications are involved in the surveillance campaign. Moreover, the CEO of Patternz’s developing company, Rafi Ton, proudly disclosed its covert capabilities in a now-deleted YouTube video, including tracking users’ precise GPS coordinates.
“The surveillance machine, designed for digital advertising, now directly facilitates mass surveillance by governments. Many companies, from app publishers to advertisers and major technology firms, act utterly irresponsibly. This must stop,” said Wolfie Christl, director of the Austrian research institute Cracked Labs and co-author of the article dedicated to the investigation of the surveillance tool, as stated by 404 Media.
Cracked Labs’ report notes that Patternz is sold by the private company ISA. The firm’s origin is not mentioned, but an archived version of ISA’s website indicates it is registered in Israel. Currently, information about Patternz has been removed from the company’s website.
Patternz can also be used to distribute malware among unsuspecting victims. The tool uses the real-time bidding (RTB) mechanism for advertisements, providing specific user data. Demonstrations showed that intelligence agencies could obtain all necessary information through online advertising. Since the tool operates through the advertising system, this means Patternz does not need to obtain permission from developers for its covert operations.
Patternz collaborates with the Israeli ad-tech company Nuviad, also led by Rafi Ton. As a result of the partnership, Google suspended Nuviad’s account as an authorized buyer, and Microsoft terminated Nuviad’s access to its advertising platform Xandr. It’s noted that Google was rather slow to react to the actions of Nuviad and Patternz. U.S. Senators expressed concern about this as early as 2021, but Google only blocked Nuviad in 2023.
