In a nutshell: German police authorities purchase advertising data from data brokers for investigations, although legal scholars classify this practice as unlawful.
State criminal police offices in at least two German federal states use commercially acquired advertising data from data brokers for investigations. Experts criticize the practice as unlawful and warn of mass surveillance.
According to research by Netzpolitik and Bavarian Broadcasting, German law enforcement authorities deliberately access data holdings from the advertising industry. The state criminal police offices in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern officially confirmed that they use data from so-called data brokers for investigations. This data is typically harvested in the background of smartphone apps via advertising and tracking libraries and subsequently commercialized — without the affected users being aware of it.
According to their own statements, the authorities deploy this method, known as “Advertising Intelligence,” primarily in the areas of cybercrime and economic crime. According to their statements, it allows them to trace hidden connections between alleged perpetrators and digital crime scenes. The state criminal police office Mecklenburg-Vorpommern explained that data is used from “a small number of established commercial providers” for this purpose. Nine additional federal states refused to provide substantive information in response to media inquiries. Only Bremen, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein explicitly stated they do not purchase or use data from commercial intermediaries.
Legal experts fundamentally criticize the practice. Mark Zöller, professor of criminal law at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, emphasizes that in Germany there is no legal basis for police use of data that was collected exclusively for advertising purposes. Thus, the practice is legally unlawful. Civil rights activists and IT experts also warn that large-scale unregulated use of advertising-based intelligence leads to uncontrolled mass surveillance. Previous research has shown that data brokers make meter-precise, temporally high-resolution location data of millions of people in Germany freely marketable and enable seamless, intimate movement profiles.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 9 June 2026
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