Surveillance

Iran Used Ad Tracking To Hunt American Soldiers: Report

The U.S. government has used private ad data to get around the Fourth Amendment. Now foreign enemies are turning it into a weapon.

Matthew Petti | 7.16.2026 9:52 AM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

The Iran war gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "targeted ads." During the war, the U.S. military evacuated many of its bases, moving personnel to hotels and civilian office spaces. A new report in the Financial Times reveals the high-tech ways in which Iran followed them. In at least one place, Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iranian military is suspected of using ad tracking data to figure out which hotels were housing U.S. troops.

"Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these [ad data] exchanges, because it's such an immensely valuable source of data," Byron Tau, author of the book that revealed many of these practices, told Reason in 2024. At the time, it was known that the U.S. government used ad data to make an end run around the Fourth Amendment and track Americans without a warrant.

Now it seems that enemy governments have used it to hunt........

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