Penlink’s Webloc is sold to police in the US, UK and worldwide. It uses technology found in weather, gaming, email and religious apps to locate people using their cellphones.
In presentations prepared last year for international law enforcement agencies, representatives of US digital intelligence company Penlink showed off their flagship technology, Webloc. They demonstrated the system tracking people as they walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City, visited the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, and moved close to the UK Parliament in central London.
The presentations said that Webloc, originally developed by an Israeli startup, Cobwebs, can track hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the world. For law enforcement, that’s a powerful capability — made more so by the fact that in the US it can be used without the need for any kind of search warrant or judicial authorization.
I already knew that many apps and email services use trackers to collect information. That’s why, whenever I can, I read the privacy policy to understand what data is being collected and how it may be used. Even so, it isn’t always easy to know how secure an app really is.