Citizen Lab: Law Enforcement Used Webloc to Track 500 Million Devices via Ad Data

A Citizen Lab-style investigation details Webloc, an ad-based geolocation surveillance product originally from Cobwebs Technologies and now sold by Penlink, which aggregates advertising-derived mobile device identifiers and geolocation data from hundreds of millions of devices. The report documents Webloc’s capabilities (historical location data, IP-based inference, identification of home/work addresses), lists law enforcement and military customers across multiple countries, identifies linked corporate relationships and server infrastructure, and raises concerns about intrusive, potentially warrantless tracking of activists, officials, and the general public.