“For Crypta, each user is represented as a set of identifiers, and the system cannot associate them with a natural person in the real world,” Cherevko claims. She suggests it is not implausible to create segments for military-aged men who are looking to leave Russia. “When you think about what else you could do, if you can make that kind of calculation, it's kind of creepy, especially in Russia,” McCrea says. Regulators have failed to get a grip on the issue, while others have suggested it should be banned. But the big question for her is whether creating personalized adverting is a good enough reason to collect “this invasive level of information.” Behavioral advertising has long followed people around the web, with companies hoovering up people’s data in creepy ways. Some of this information “doesn’t sound that unusual” for online advertising, McCrea says. One part of the code looked to pull data from the Mail app and included fields about “boarding passes” and “hotels.” There is also a “travelers” section that can use location data to track whether they have traveled from their normal location to another-it includes international and domestic fields. While “summer residents” may indicate people who have holiday homes and uses location data to determine this. She says a “smokers” segment appears to track people who purchase smoking-related items, like e-cigarettes. McCrea says some categories stand out more than others. There are advertising segments for people who use Yandex’s Alice smart speaker, “film lovers” can be grouped by their favorite genre, there are laptop users, people who “searched Radisson on maps,” and mobile gamers who show a long-term interest. “It's enough to build any grouping, or segmentation of the audience.” The segments created by Crypta appear to be highly specific and show how powerful data about our online lives is when it is aggregated. “The amount of data that Yandex has through the Metrica is so huge, it's just impossible to even imagine it,” says Grigory Bakunov, a former Yandex engineer and deputy CTO who left the company in 2019. At times, its systems attempt to link multiple different IDs together. This is fed into Crypta, with the Wi-Fi network name being linked to a person’s overall Yandex ID, the researcher says. It also grabs the names of the Wi-Fi networks people are connecting to. McCrea questions how useful this is for advertising. The source code shows AppMetrica collecting data on people’s precise location, including their altitude, direction, and the speed they may be traveling. Broadly, the company can gather information about someone’s device, location, search history, home location, work location, music listening and movie viewing history, email data, and more. Other information is gathered automatically. Some data collected by Yandex is handed over when people use its services, such as sharing their location to show where they are on a map. This kind of advertising system underpins much of the modern web’s economy, with Google, Facebook, and thousands of advertisers relying on similar technologies. The leak also included code from two of Yandex’s key systems: its web analytics service, which captures details about how people browse, and its powerful behavioral analytics tool, which helps run its ad service that makes millions of dollars. Yandex’s search engine, maps, AI voice assistant, taxi service, email app, and cloud services were all laid bare. The trove, which is said to have come from a disgruntled employee, doesn’t include any user data but provides an unparalleled view into the operation of its apps and services. An anonymous user of the hacking site BreachForums publicly shared a downloadable 45-gigabyte cache of Yandex’s code. It became the latest in a short list of high-profile firms to have its source code leaked. In January, Yandex suffered the unthinkable. But as with all tech giants, there’s a downside of Yandex being everywhere: It can gobble up huge amounts of data. It dominates online search, ride-hailing, and music streaming, while its maps, payment, email, and scores of other services are popular. The tech giant-often referred to as “Russia’s Google”-is part of daily life for millions of people. If you live in Russia, there’s no avoiding Yandex.
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