Alongside our report, Hungarian journalist Szabolcs Panyi publishes a VSquare investigation which reveals that Hungarian domestic intelligence has used Webloc since at least 2022, and still does today.

This is the first confirmation of the use of ad-based surveillance technology in Europe:
https://vsquare.org/orban-spying-toolkit-cobwebs-webloc-hungary-spyware-citizen-lab

i and my colleagues at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab spent months investigating Webloc, its capabilities and customers, based on public records, leaked docs, freedom of information requests and technical analysis.

Webloc is an add-on to the social media and web intelligence system Tangles, both developed by Israeli Cobwebs Technologies and since 2023 sold by US-based vendor Penlink.

This screen, from a leaked 2021 document, shows how Webloc tracked a person travelling from Germany via Austria to Hungary.

The system obtains the data from everyday consumer apps installed on phones. The data is tied to mobile device IDs typically used for ad targeting, which identify a phone and its owner.

The systematic misuse of this data for tracking and profiling in digital marketing is already highly problematic. Misusing it for government surveillance is another level of disastrous.