The innovation at the heart of the advertising technology industry is automated auctions to trade real-time data about mobile phone users—including their physical location and browsing habits, but not their real names. The primary purpose of this activity, known as real-time bidding, is to put digital ads in front of the people most likely to click on them. But it’s also possible to purchase this data with other goals in mind.
One notable nonadvertising participant is Rayzone Group Ltd. The Tel Aviv-based surveillance company for years has quietly harvested advertising data and repurposed it to help governments track individuals through their mobile phones. As part of these efforts, Rayzone has acquired companies specializing in ad technology and established relationships with brokers that resell data from major advertising exchanges, including the one owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
Rayzone feeds advertising data it obtains into a service called Echo, which it sells to governments around the globe. Echo is among the first known commercially available surveillance systems to exploit advertising data this way, according to industry experts. Rayzone positions the product as an all-seeing technology that’s more or less impossible to avoid or disable. As its marketing materials say: “You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape your own echo.”
