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How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."
It begins with an entity called an advertising exchange, basically a massive marketplace where billions of mobile devices and computers notify a centralized server whenever they have an open ad space. UberMedia was started by the veteran advertising and technology executive Bill Gross, who had helped invent keyword-targeted ads—the kinds of ads that appear on Google when you search a specific term. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.
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