Israeli Intel Veterans Are Tracking You With Digital Billboards. Perion Network, an Israeli company headquartered in Tel Aviv, owns Hivestack, which participates in the advertising infrastructure connected to "LED Truck Media." Perion deliberately recruited veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s military signals intelligence and cyber unit, and company leadership said those veterans helped develop most of its platforms and security systems. Perion also states that personnel in Israel may access information stored on servers in the United States and Europe. Perion’s own privacy materials describe advertising systems that process mobile advertising IDs, IP addresses, precise GPS location, browsing activity, app usage, advertising interactions, and third party audience information. That means an Israeli company with extensive former Israeli intelligence personnel involvement participates in an advertising system capable of processing data that can identify your device, place it at specific locations, associate it with online behavior, and measure how it responds to advertising. THE BROADER TRACKING CAPABILITY LED Truck Media’s wider advertising ecosystem shows how invasive that capability can become. When you pass one of its digital advertising trucks, measurement technology can compare the truck’s exact location and advertising schedule against mobile device movement data to determine which phones were nearby while a specific message was playing. You do not have to click anything, scan a QR code, enter your name, or knowingly interact with the advertisement. LED Truck Media has also advertised the ability to capture device identifiers and retarget devices later. Your phone carries advertising identifiers that allow companies to recognize the same device repeatedly. Those identifiers can be connected to location data and other information. Taken together, these capabilities build a record of: Where your device appeared When it appeared there Which advertisement you encountered Which behavioral or demographic categories companies assigned to you Where your device appeared afterward Whether you responded to later advertising Whether the system should retarget you again This is not simple ad measurement. It is a collection system built around location, identification, profiling, attribution, and retargeting. Repeated location observations can begin to resemble the pattern of life intelligence that intelligence services use to understand a target’s routines, movements, and associations. You can pass a digital advertising truck without knowingly interacting with it and still have your phone identified, placed at a specific time and location, added to a behavioral profile, and retargeted later. Foreign surveillance once required someone to follow the target. Commercial tracking lets your own phone do much of that work. #Surveillance #IranWar