Foreign states, including China, as well as terrorists and criminals, obtain extensive data on Australian defence, security and political leaders with ease and, increasingly, in real-time.

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This poses an unacceptable security risk which will increase as geopolitical tensions rise.

The recent shootings of Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman and her husband are a chilling reminder that the tools of surveillance and targeting are not just available to foreign adversaries but to anyone with malicious intent.

Notebook excerpts from the alleged shooter, Vance Boelter, and presented in a court filing show he used data brokers and aggregators to find the home addresses of his intended targets.

Politico reports that police allegedly found the names of 11 registered data brokers in Boelter's abandoned car after the shootings.

On an average day, Australians are tracked nearly 500 times a day, as just one form of advertising technology, AdTech, broadcasts what a person in Australia is reading or watching, and where they are.

This advertising model enables precise tracking and targeting of individuals and sells that information in an open market. The risks of data usage in conflict has been acknowledged for years, but remain unaddressed.

AdTech is active on almost all websites and apps.

One type, known as real-time bidding (RTB), is an online auction. It is an invisible, instantaneous and automated process, happening in the microseconds that a webpage or app loads.

It broadcasts personal and sensitive data, including geolocation data about Australians, without security measures to protect the data to facilitate the bidding for advertising.

RTB happens billions of times a day.

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