The stalls and the free samples¶

The unusual thing about this trade is not that the goods are sensitive. It is that the promotional instrument is a working surveillance capability, handed out to strangers who ask politely, because the fastest way to sell a subscription is to let the customer see what the subscription contains.

The sample is the sales pitch¶

The files that drove the reporting arrived as free previews. In July 2024 netzpolitik.org and Bayerischer Rundfunk obtained 3.6 billion location points covering some 11 million advertising identifiers across roughly two months of late 2023 in Germany, supplied by the American broker Datastream Group through the Berlin marketplace Datarade, without the video verification call some sellers ask for. It previewed a monthly subscription, and the continuous stream behind it went for around 14,000 dollars, from a seller advertising coverage of up to 163 countries refreshed hourly.

The second file came the same way. In January 2025 a preview held 380 million records and 47 million identifiers across 137 countries from a single summer day. Later previews carried roughly 278 million records from Belgium with 2.6 million identifiers, and about a billion records from up to 16.4 million French devices. Scale is the pitch, so the sample is generous by design, and a sample generous enough to demonstrate the product is also generous enough to locate a defence ministry’s staff.

The subscription price does not confine the customer base to services with intelligence budgets. It admits more or less anyone with a business address.

Repackaging, and the useful vagueness of a timestamp¶

Brokers rarely collect. They buy, bundle, relabel and resell, and the relabelling is where the goods acquire their shine. Records are refreshed with new timestamps so that ageing inventory presents as current. Sellers describe their own supply in terms that are difficult to check, and when asked to be specific, cite contracts that forbid naming sources. One broker did name a supplier, a Lithuanian adtech firm, which denied the relationship.

Company identity is nearly as fluid as the goods. Datastream Group renamed itself Datasys partway through the investigation, and in 2025 announced it had permanently ceased the sale and licensing of geolocation data. The data remained available. Other names on the same marketplace, Factori and Unacast among them, continued to offer location products, and the capability was not noticeably diminished by the departure of the firm that had supplied the first file.

The marketplace that lists rather than sells¶

Datarade sits in Berlin and carries offerings from more than two thousand vendors, filterable by geography, data type and seller, which it says makes it the largest data marketplace in the world. Its position is that a marketplace operator cannot be expected to scan every listing for legal problems and is not required to, and that it makes all reasonable efforts against unlawful content. Both statements can be true at once, and the structure is what makes them compatible: the platform supplies discovery and liquidity, and holds no data, so the risk stays with the sellers.

The public money is the part that reads oddly. Datarade has taken about 1.5 million euros from the High-Tech Gründerfonds, a venture fund of some 320 million euros, more than half of it, 170 million, from the federal economics ministry. The founder had promised radical transparency for the data market, and by one measure delivered it: the shop window is where the trade became visible to journalists in the first place.

Pressure produces motion without producing change. After the first reporting, the platform preventatively removed a provider’s location listings. When netzpolitik.org returned in September 2025, an editorial page about mobile location data had come down, several listings had gone, and location offerings were still searchable by coordinates and advertising identifier while new suppliers were recruited by email, with the recruitment putting the market volume, the takings of everyone trading in it, at 93 million euros. Berlin’s data protection authority explained the gap: while a marketplace only introduces buyers to sellers without processing the data itself, the authority has no handle on it.

Substitutable by construction¶

A market like this has no keystone, and the absence is what gives it its resilience. Every function in it, collection through an embedded kit, accumulation from the auction feed, bundling, listing, resale, is performed by several firms in several jurisdictions, and any one of them can leave without the supply thinning. Datastream did leave, or said so, and the goods stayed on the shelves under other names. That is not evasion in the conspiratorial sense; it is what a competitive market for a commodity looks like when the commodity happens to be everybody’s movements.

Enforcement against a node therefore buys a change of letterhead. The structural targets are elsewhere: the identifier that makes the goods composable, which two companies issue, and the auction that makes them abundant, whose demand side one of those same two certifies. Neither sits on the transaction path supervisors have been reaching.

The clerk’s brief¶

September 2025: The shop, a year on¶

On 16 September 2025 netzpolitik.org found Datarade trading much as before, with location data searchable by coordinates and advertising identifier, listings withdrawn only after enquiries, suppliers still recruited by email against a stated market volume of 93 million euros, and a city supervisor with no handle on a marketplace that only introduces buyers to sellers. The clerks note that a year of international coverage produced tidier listings.

May 2025: A broker leaves the trade, and the trade does not notice¶

Reporting on the Norwegian case on 25 May 2025 recorded Datastream Group’s statement that it had permanently ceased the sale and licensing of geolocation data, the firm having already renamed itself Datasys. Comparable products stayed available from other sellers. The clerks file this as the first clean test of substitutability, and record that the market passed it without visible effort.

January 2025: A second sample, larger and cheerfully international¶

On 15 January 2025 a free preview of 380 million records carrying 47 million advertising identifiers across 137 countries reached journalists from a single day’s collection. The clerks observe that the sample was offered as evidence of quality, and worked: it demonstrated precisely the capability advertised, to precisely the sort of stranger the seller had not checked.

July 2024: A free sample of 3.6 billion points¶

On 16 July 2024 netzpolitik.org and Bayerischer Rundfunk reported the German file, 3.6 billion locations from around 11 million identifiers over two months, taken as a free preview of a monthly subscription, from a seller asking around 14,000 dollars for the continuous stream. The clerks note the entry price for a national movement archive.

The stall count¶

Two thousand vendors on one Berlin marketplace, an unknown number elsewhere, and the same goods circulating between them under successive labels. The trade’s defining habits are stable: samples given away to demonstrate scale, timestamps refreshed to keep inventory current, sources unnameable by contract, and corporate identity changed as required. One supplier’s exit in 2025 removed nothing from the shelves. Public venture money remains in the shop window, and the city’s supervisor has no procedure that reaches it. The clerks’ reading is that this is an ordinary commodity market in every respect except the commodity, and that ordinary commodity markets are extremely difficult to switch off one stall at a time.