A look at Tel Aviv-based Rayzone, whose surveillance system Echo, sold to governments, exploits ad data to track people via their phones
The innovation at the heart of the advertising technology industry is automated auctions to trade real-time data about mobile phone users … Tweets: @nervusbelli and @rj_gallagher Tweets: @nervusbelli : How about some more deterrence for stealing US tech and then reselling it to thugocracies and saying that's “great?” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : I wrote about an Israeli company called Rayzone, which is using the advertising industry as a vehicle to collect vast amounts of data from mobile phones, then repurposing the data to help dozens of government agencies worldwide track people. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's report on Rayzone closes a loop that has been opening since 2020: Forbes first documented Israeli vendors like Verint-backed Bsightful hooking into ad exchanges to siphon app location data, and weeks later invoices showed Rayzone itself had leased SS7 traffic from a Channel Islands operator to monitor cell communications. The new reporting names the productization layer — Echo, sold to dozens of government agencies — built on top of those data pipes.
What makes this matter is scale of supply, not novelty of demand. The Markup's accounting of the $12B location-data industry mapped the collectors and aggregators feeding these systems, and Mobilewalla's letter to Sen. Wyden confirmed broker-sourced data reaching DHS, the IRS, and the US military for warrantless device tracking. Rayzone shows where all of that inventory ultimately lands: state surveillance.
First-order effects
- Government agencies buying Echo gain phone-tracking capability without hacking phones themselves — their targeting runs through legitimate ad-industry infrastructure, so the immediate exposure falls on mobile users whose data already flows through automated ad auctions.
- Ad-tech intermediaries now face the reputational and legal problem of being named as the collection vehicle for government tracking rather than mere marketing infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- Rival surveillance vendors like Bsightful, already in the same ad-exchange channel per the earlier reporting, are pushed toward productized government offerings like Echo rather than raw data resale, compressing margins for brokers who stay upstream.
- Advertisers' own demand for real-time auction data becomes the cover under which state buyers operate, raising pressure on ad exchanges to gate who can bid — a cost and compliance burden the advertising industry did not price in when building RTB.
Third-order effects
- If ad-market plumbing keeps doubling as a surveillance feed, regulators face a structural choice between policing individual spyware vendors like Rayzone and forcing access controls into the location-data marketplaces themselves — the pattern traced from Tracer's resale abroad through the Mobilewalla disclosures suggests vendor-by-vendor enforcement cannot keep up.
The trend: Commercial location-data infrastructure is being systematically repurposed into government surveillance tooling, turning ad-tech's data exhaust into an intelligence supply chain.