GLOBEALERT
Cyber● Elevated1h ago · Nov 12, 2026, 12:02 PM

Another Way Police Are Locating People from Their Smartphones

GlobeAlert Desk · curated from Schneier · global

Penlink’s Webloc is an application that locates people using information from the weather, gaming, email, and religious apps on their phone. It’s sold to the police. The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific pla

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Threat level
2 Elevated

Scored from severity, scale, escalation potential and source agreement. Below the alert threshold.

Sources
1 publisher

Single-source so far. Treat details as unconfirmed until more publishers report.

Category
Cyber

Not flagged as developing.

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