This is not the first time that online advertising has been accused of causing problems . It has already been accused of interfering in the 2016 US presidential election, maliciously raising fears about immigration and enabling anti-Semitic filters, as in the case of Facebook . But the problem could now be bigger. According to recent publications, advertising could be able to track the movements of individuals in real time .
This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Washington . According to them, anyone could spend a little money and track, in relative real time, the movements of a human target .
“The first step in enabling location tracking through ads is to obtain the target’s MAID (Mobile Advertising ID) by sniffing their network traffic, which allows us to specify ads to only be delivered to that target device,” the study said. “We then create a series of ads, targeting that MAID, but also targeting a different GPS location. All of this creates a grid-like geographic ad pattern . We can then observe which of these ads are being served, and this will tell us where the target was .”
According to the researchers, this technique could be carried out for an investment of just "a thousand dollars or less ." At that price, even a simple stalker could try it.
Furthermore, the researchers point out that certain so-called “ideological afghanistan phone number vigilantes” could exploit it . “For example, a homophobic group could post ads on gay apps and locate targets. This information could be sufficient for the group’s purposes, for example, if it exposes the number of gay people in a given location. They could also use ADINT to gather further information about the targets.”
Although, as mashable.com notes , the researchers declined to reveal the ad network used for the study, they point to an industry-wide problem .
As for what to do to protect yourself , the researchers have a few suggestions. “Users concerned about privacy risks should consider resetting their MAID . Users could also turn off location access for apps on their devices .” Resetting MAID regularly, while tricky, can be done on both Android and iOS.