This Tool Unmasks the Shadowy World of Ads that Track Your Location

DecryptAds — From Hidden Flows to Public Insight

DecryptAds maps programmatic ad-tech supply chains from public files — ads.txt, sellers.json, and related signals — so you can trace hidden flows and surface invalid supply.

Everyone knows your location

How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.

Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware - The Citizen Lab

This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and hack devices around the world.

bsky.app | WhoTracks.Me

Explore the tracking landscape of bsky.app on WhoTracks.Me, revealing the most common trackers like Sentry and their impact on privacy

Dark Web Informer on Twitter / X

‼️🇺🇸 LAPSUS$ Group is allegedly selling a massive dataset of https://t.co/Q6UlD72i8v, an AI recruiting platform with $500M+ revenue, is being auctioned on a popular cybercrime forum, TG, and their website.▪️Total Size: ~4TB▪️Data Includes: 211GB of database▪️939GB of source… pic.twitter.com/hEvp244uNO— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) March 30, 2026

Ad Tech Says It’s Not In The Surveillance Business. Now Is The Time To Prove It | AdExchanger

ICE wants to know how ad tech and location data could aid investigations. The question is: Will ad tech finally draw a line – or cross one?

The Powerful AI Tool That Cops (or Stalkers) Can Use to Geolocate Photos in Seconds

For months members of the public have been using GeoSpy, a tool trained on millions of images that can find the location a photo was taken based on soil, architecture, and more. It's GeoGuesser at scale.

All The Places

A growing set of web scrapers designed to output consistent geodata about as many places of business in the world as possible.

Online ads weaponised to deliver ‘zero-click’ spyware, researchers say

Discover-Tech’s Controlium software lets clients mass-profile internet users then covertly hack targets, say researchers at University of Toronto

Search privately and without ads — Uruky

Search privately and without ads using Uruky, the private search engine.

Dealroom.co | Infillion buys Foursquare, adding location data to its ad platform

What's the deal? Infillion is acquiring location data company Fo…

ICCL report on the scale of Real-Time Bidding data broadcasts in the U.S. and Europe - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

New report: the $127 billion "Real-Time Bidding" online ad industry tracks & shares what people view online, and their locations, 178 Trillion times a year in the U.S. & Europe.

Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

404 Media has obtained a cache of internal police emails showing at least two agencies have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that analyzes architecture, soil, and other features to near instantly geolocate photos.