In the US, the analogy would be if apps had tracking SDKs in them, that fingerprinted users across apps, in order to better target them for advertisements, and then the US government can pick up that data and do whatever they'd like with it.
I've never really thought about it before, but it would be pretty easy for a three-letter agency to set up an online advertising company for this purpose.
They start their own airlines (Air America, JANET, etc.), so starting an adtech company should be a walk in the park.
But they don't even need to do that - they just approach an existing adtech company with a FISA warrant and get their data. If they started their own adtech company, eventually they would be out-ed and exposed. But with a FISA warrant, it's mostly business-as-usual for everyone.
> But they don't even need to do that - they just approach an existing adtech company with a FISA warrant and get their data.
Depending on who they approach, they won't even need a FISA warrant because in the US information voluntarily given to third parties has "no reasonable expectation of privacy" [0]
> I've never really thought about it before, but it would be pretty easy for a three-letter agency to set up an online advertising company for this purpose.
There's no need to set one up when you can break into many/all the existing advertising companies; remember "SSL added and removed here :^)" written on an NSA slide, referring to Google's clear-text internal data-center traffic? Also, the NSA spent a fuck-ton of money on compute to factor enough primes to trivially break 20-40%[1] of SSL traffic of the day...in real time.
1. This was about 6 years ago, I can't remember exact percentage, but it was definitely at least 20%, IIRC, the attack was on the key-exchange step
I've never really thought about it before, but it would be pretty easy for a three-letter agency to set up an online advertising company for this purpose.
They start their own airlines (Air America, JANET, etc.), so starting an adtech company should be a walk in the park.