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A Virginia-based federal contractor has used more than 500 mobile applications to track unsuspecting Americans, according to a Friday report.
Anomaly Six LLC has installed its proprietary software kit, like SDK, on hundreds of unnamed applications, according to the report in The Wall Street Journal. App makers can pay companies to install the software on their apps to track customers. The companies generally sell the data for advertisers to use when targeting customers.
The company refused to provide the data to the U.S. government, despite keeping what it described as “unclassified but confidential” contracts with federal agencies.
The company was founded by Jeffrey Heinz en Brandan Huff, Army veterans who hired another Virginia company specializing in electronic surveillance, Babel Street, in 2018. Huff, a former opponent’s servant, handled Babel Street’s contracts with the Department of Defense, while Heinz oversaw the Justice Department and US Cyber Command.
Reports in the last several years have described Babel Street’s product “Find X”, which allows the company to track smartphone users with commercial data from their applications. Government agencies including the FBI and the U.S. military have sent millions to Babel Street over federal contracts, the terms of which have never been disclosed.
A 2018 lawsuit filed against Anomaly Six by Babel Street alleged that the new company had developed a new product to compete with Find X. The suit was settled in 2019 on undisclosed terms.
The report comes a day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, and WeChat from Tencent to prohibit U.S. companies from doing business with one of the entities. The administration has made the case that ByteDance and Tencent – both headquartered in China – siphon user data in unusual ways, and that the Chinese government can use the information too easily to spy on users around the world.
It is not clear how many federal agencies have contracts with Anomaly Six and Babel Streets, according to public documents, and it is not yet clear how many applications they use to retrieve user data.
“Anomaly Six is not mentioned in any public spending contracts, and many of Babel Street’s sales to government entities are also not reflected in public documents,” he said. Journal noted. “Anomaly Six said its contracts with the U.S. government were unclassified but confidential, and that it could not disclose with which agencies it worked without the consent of those agencies.”
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