Smartphones: massive data leaks… that are perfectly legal

On December 10, 2025, the french media Le Monde, in collaboration with several media partners, highlighted the extent of data leaks from smartphones by analyzing an advertising database sold by a data broker. 

This database contained more than sixteen million advertising identifiers and nearly one billion geolocation data points, making it possible to reconstruct the movements of millions of users with an accuracy sometimes reaching just a few meters.

Easily identifiable sensitive profiles

One of the most concerning aspects of the investigation relates to the nature of the profiles present in the database.
Journalists identified information related to military personnel, police officers, intelligence service agents, as well as employees from the private sector.

Based solely on geolocation data, it was possible to locate sensitive sites, track daily movements, identify places of residence and, in some cases, reconstruct personal or family circles.

Advertising data, not hacking

A key point is that this is neither hacking nor exploiting a security flaw in the traditional sense.
The data analyzed comes from the normal and legal functioning of the mobile advertising ecosystem. As Le Monde points out, even with rigorous digital hygiene, it is now difficult to completely escape these mechanisms.

For organizations, this reality greatly alters the nature of mobile risk. A work device, or a personal device used for work purposes, can expose sensitive data without any visible attack being detected.

Legal applications with intrusive behavior

The data used in the investigation comes mainly from mobile applications available on official application stores, and more specifically from advertising identifiers integrated into these applications, which can track a device's activity over time.

Many everyday applications, including widely used consumer applications (Candycrush, Vinted, Tiktok...), use these mechanisms for advertising purposes.
This phenomenon is far from isolated: more than 60% of mobile applications use excessive data exploitation practices.

These are known as intrusive applications: applications that are perfectly legal, but whose behavior is abusive in terms of data collection. They extract and exploit significant amounts of personal information (geolocation, identifiers, behavioral data...) that is not directly related to their functional use.

This data, obtained legally with the user's consent, is then transmitted to advertising intermediaries, aggregated on a large scale, and resold by data brokers.

Why a Mobile Threat Defense solution is essential

Today, it is imperative for organizations to be able to analyze the permissions actually used by applications, outgoing data flows, and abusive behaviors, even when they are legal. However, neither antivirus solutions nor device management solutions (MDM/UEM) are designed to identify these types of risks.

This is precisely where a Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solution becomes essential, by providing behavioral detection and automatic remediation capabilities across all mobile threat vectors.

Pradeo Mobile Threat Defense supports this approach by offering sovereign protection for mobile devices, capable of identifying risky application behavior and automatically applying remediation measures, without relying on a traditional hacking model.

The Pradeo solution is currently the only French and European solution recognized worldwide for its expertise in mobile security.