Last year, A Communication survey Revealing that a data broker is based in Florida, DataSream, which is selling very sensitive location data tracking US military and intelligence staff abroad. At that time, the origin of that data was not known.
Now, a letter was sent to the office of the US Senator Ron Wyden, by an international collective of international media, including wired and 404 media thought that the source of data The last of the data is Eskimi, a Lithuanian advertising technology company.
The role of Eskimi highlights the opaque and bonding properties of the location data industry: A Lithuanian company has provided data on US military staff in Germany to a data broker in Florida, You can then sell that data to anyone.
There is a global threat risk, from some unknown advertising companies and those companies are basically breaking all these systems by abusing their access and selling data. This extremely sensitive to brokers sell it to the government and the private interests, Zach Edwards, Zach Edwards, high -end threat analyst at Cyber Security Company Silent Push, referring to the ecosystem Widely advertising technology.
In December, Wired's joint investigation, Bayerischer Runfunk (Br) and netzpolitik.org netzpolitik.org analyzed a free location data template provided by Datastream. The investigation shows that DataSream is providing access to the exact location data from devices that may belong to the US military and intelligence staff abroad, including German aircraft base that is said to be Storing American nuclear weapons. DataSream is a data broker in location data history, finding data sources from other suppliers and then selling it to customers. Its site previously said they have provided advertising data on the Internet combined with hash, cookies and mobile location data.
That data set contains 3.6 billion location coordinates, some are recorded in the periods (up to 11 million mobile advertising IDs in Germany for a period of a month. Through SDK (software development kit) is embedded in mobile applications by developers who intentionally integrate monitoring tools in exchange for revenue sharing agreements with houses. Data brokerage.
After this report, Wyden's office requested the answer from the Datastream Group about its role in trading the position of the US soldier's position. In response, Datastream identified Eskimi as its source, saying that it has gained data legally from a respected third -party supplier, Eskimi.com. Vytautas Paukstys, CEO of Eskimi, said that Eskimi did not have or had any trade relations with the Datasys/Datastream group, referring to another name that DataSream used and Eskimi was not a one. Data broker.
In an email to answer detailed questions from the reporting collective, M. Seth Lubin, a lawyer representing the Datastream Group, described the legal origin from third party. Although Lubin acknowledged Wyden that the data was intended for use in digital ads, he emphasized the collective report that it was never planned to resell. Lubin refused to disclose the data source, quoting an non -disclosure agreement and rejected the Report Collective's analysis of recklessness and misleading.
The Ministry of Defense (DOD) refused to answer specific questions related to our investigation. However, in December, the spokesperson of DOD Javan Rasnake said that the Pentagon is aware that the geographical positioning services can make employees at risk and call for members of the service to remember the training of training. They and strictly comply with operational security protocols.
In an email, Keith Chu, the main media adviser and Wyden's deputy director, explained how their office tried to join the data protection agency (DPA) of Eskimi and Lithuania month. The office contacted Eskimi on November 21 and had not received a response, Chu said. After that, the staff contacted DPA many times, causing concerns about the national security impact of a Lithuanian company selling location data of US military staff to serve abroad. After not receiving feedback, Wyden's staff contacted the defense attache at the Embassy Lithuania in Washington, DC.