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Cell Phone Tracking Reveals Users' Habits
DinkyDogg writes "'New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.' More interesting than their conclusion, however, is how they got their data. 'The researchers said they used the potentially controversial data only after any information that could identify individuals had been scrambled. Even so, they wrote, people's wanderings are so subject to routine that by using the patterns of movement that emerged from the research, "we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location." The researchers were able to obtain the data from a European provider of cellphone service that was obligated to collect the information. By agreement with the company, the researchers did not disclose the country where the provider operates.' Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?"
My typical day is: wake up, shower, go to work, be at work 8h (I don't go out for lunch), go back home, cook, eat, relax, sleep. That adds up to 2 places where I'll be, and anywhere on the highway to work. Add in grocery shopping in one of the two nearby supermarkets and you pretty much know where I'll be on any given day Monday to Friday.
On weekends it might be a bit more complex because I go to the recycling centre, eventually visit my parents or my wifes parents, go to a restaurant, the movies, but even then.... What is it going to add up to? A dozen places?
This only proves that we're routine-animals. That's all....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
well.. im not going to feel vindicated or anything, the implications are that orwell is rolling over in his grave fast enough to generate free energy for the entire planet if you were to assemble a turbine around him.
so now they know what youre saying, or browsing on the web, and are able to watch you marked on a map as you move from one place to another.
so, when are you voting out the people who did this? at least most western nations outside the US have more choices than tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum
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Contrary to what the paper suggests, the data has not been anonymized. Proper anonymization means that you cannot derive correlations between the behavior of the individuals, which was the whole point of the paper.
I don't know the exact legal situation in every European country. However, in EU countries this is regulated by the Directive on the protection of personal data, which requires for scientific use that safeguards have to be taken to prevent the identification of individuals. For some countries like Germany this means that the data has to be anonymized, although it is a grey area whether pseudonymization is sufficient.
More details on that matter can be found on my blog.
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Germany?
Maybe it was in London, Tel Aviv and Antwerp, Belgium, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/business/11ftraffic.html
...that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time,Forget those losers, I wanna know about the people that can be in 2 or more locations at the time!
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Whatever country this was, I wonder how this data could have been transferred to the US without breaking European law. And I wonder whether CIA and NSA already obtained a copy of it.
Driving around is becoming obsolete.
Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?
This is not necessarily the type of data they collected.
Here in Europe, in some countries, cell phone companies offer a service that can reveal a phone's location (with the precision of a fraction of a kilometer/mile) at any given time from any place actually. It's useful for tracking your phone when it gets stolen, or spying on your spouses.
However, the owner of the phone must consent to this service. Any tracking (except maybe for aid in criminal investigations?) without the owner's consent would be very illegal. And I suspect what happened here, is the company collected data of such consenting owners.
Whether they consented to having their data used in research, well, that's another matter.
Germany.
If you think the USA is bad with regards to telephone taps and the like, try the Netherlands.
Last year, in the Netherlands 25,000 phones where tapped (for different periods of time). These are published numbers (I could link to them but the articles are in dutch only so, well..)
In the USA, the official numbers are somewhere around 2200 phone taps (in 2007).
But that's not all; keep in mind that the USA has over 300 million inhabitants. The Netherlands has only 16 million.
So either the USA government is doing a much better job of keeping even the fact that phones are tapped at all hidden from public scrutiny, or it really is much, much worse here (in this regard, at least).
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
...at least most western nations outside the US have more choices than tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum
Americans have lots of choices. But they like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum
What?
A potential hint as to the featured country might be the name of the author of the project:
âoeSlices of our behavior are preserved in these electronic data sets,â said Albert-LÃszlà BarabÃsi, an author of the project and the director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston. âoeThis is creating huge opportunities for science.â
As if the obvious Hungarian name wasn't enough, his wikipedia entry states he's lived in Hungary and Transylvania. Of course, this might be (and probably is) purely coincidental.
In any case, I, for one, welcome our new PhD vampiric overlords.
It wouldnt surprise me if it was Britain. Every day i learn something new that makes me despise living here. After all we are generally regarded as being the most spied on nation in the world.
,buses and trains. When I worked in canary wharf it was more like double that as i needed to use the Tubes which are also littered with CCTV. Some of them actually talk (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm)
The other day i realised that my entire journey from home to work i am exposed to at least 15 cameras along the entire journey. We have cameras on streets, platforms
While I appreciate its "there to protect us" Im afraid i dont trust the people who's job its to monitor them.
So that's why i wouldnt be at all surprised if it was the UK tracking moves - after all they are tracking everything else.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Menwith_Hill)
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Actually some countries use (allegedly) anonymized cell phone data to track traffic jams. This seems to work quite well. At least there have been several experiments and the idea seems promising.
I would consider this a completely legitimate use of the data. However I highly doubt that it is properly anonymized, but that's a different matter.
This could explain why such data was gathered in the first place. If you can still track particular users, it is not anonymized at all however.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
i like this articles...can i put it in my site?
http://the-digital-asset-management.blogspot.com
T Mobile? I would not be surprised.
The country is definitely Germany. You can get the publication in question from the authors homepage Then take figure 1a (as suggested in hweimer's blog) and lay it over some google map, appropriately scaled.
The data is definitely centered around Germany, but tracks reach to Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Cech Republic...
because I don't want a bunch of scientists to analyze what a lazy sod I am just for leaving my cell phone at home and turned on for days at a time.
The article says June 5th. Slashdot used to be much faster than this. I happened to read this three days back. [ Granted, I should have submitted it then.]
"Anonymized" may be defined as data that cannot be traced to a named individual. Individuals may still be tracked by other means (arbitrarily assigned number, vice real phone number) to determine patterns without violating individual privacy. So long as they don't specify home addresses, cell numbers or other personally identifiable data, this is valid anonymity.
Of course, this is different from claiming that the data would be used for statistical puroposes only. This study used the data for sample correlations beyond bulk statistical analysis.
Invenio via vel creo
I am shocked and appalled that team Mobile would consent to use their customers' data in this manner! Shame on you Team Mobile!
don't be so condescending to me and more than 300 million of my fellow citizens.
american media is more concentrated now than it has been for over 3/4 of a century and more subservient to the government than ever.
how do you expect a critical mass to form in support of replacing one or both political parties currently in power when the media in bed with them doesn't properly cover it.
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Is that it gives the government even less excuse to use no-knock raids for crimes that could easily be handled by regular police work. Take the case of Ryan Frederick, for example. The police created a situation where they ended up losing an officer after they attacked the house of a suspected drug dealer (who shows all signs so far of being completely innocent). Had the police gotten his cell phone information and mapped his daily routine, they could have discretely caught him by surprise in a public place, taken him in for questioning, and the only one going to jail would have been the police informant who lied his ass off and victimized both sides. This cell phone tracking actually gives civil libertarians an argument as to why these raids cannot possibly be justified in most cases because the police can figure out where the person is going, and ambush them when they have the advantage (something they don't have when assaulting a home).
It's funny to watch headlines attempt to troll out tin-foil hat crowd. This data seems much more useful for the development of cities than it would for evil advertisers or jack-boot government thugs who can find you through any number of measures and come get you whenever they feel like it.
Personally, I don't care much about folks knowing my routine. Wow, I go to work, come home, go shopping, go for a walk, and head off to the same few places every weekend. If data for a better mass-transit system or better roads was to result, that'd be great.
how do you expect a critical mass to form in support of replacing one or both political parties currently in power when the media in bed with them doesn't properly cover it.
Heh, by looking beyond the mass media, silly. Too many people just aren't uncomfortable enough to give a damn. Your fellow citizens are who's keeping them in power, nobody else. Not the media, not the corporations, just you and yours. If you won't go past what's being spoon fed by mass media, then look in the mirror. It's just too easy now.
What?
Think of it this way. In 2000, the Democrats lost some of their votes to Mr. Third Party (also known as tweedle-doo). And guess who got elected as a result of that?
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
It is possible that it is Germany this time, but data is being collected in a similar way in Belgium too.
Two points of interest in the Belgian case (the first probably also true for this article):
* You don't have to make a call for them to know your location. Mobile phones are being tracked as long as they're powered on.
* The (anonymized) data are being used for traffic analysis - not just congestion, but also route analysis: how many people reaching Antwerp by a certain highway enter the city, how many visit the harbour, how many just pass by on their way in the direction of Brussels, how many towards Ghent, etc.
...I've left my cellphone at home, now they'll think that I never leave my house and don't get out much!
Wonder what they'll think if I attach my phone to FIDO?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Good characters tend to view the world with rose-colored glasses and this is why they die alone in a horribly catastrophic way while going out to town for a drink of ale.
Dammit, I miss those days.
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This research just found out, that a cellphone can be found in one of few locations, not that its owner can be found there.
Exempli gratia I don't take my phone with me, when I go out to prepare my daily terror attacs.
Color me surprised. I figured the UK was a sucker bet.
Here is some of the anonymous data: .... .... ....
Anonymous 1: Arrives at 10 downing st. every evening at 21:00, and goes to work at 08:00
Anonymous 2: Arrives at Buckingham every nite at 23:00, but sneaks out at 01:00 and goes to the big oak tree in Hyde park.
Anynomous 31415: Sneaks out from 45 Lexington in Soho, and goes the the big oak tree in Hyde park.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?"
That would be the UK.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
But I guess if you need to set the stage for righteous anger about privacy you need something stronger than that.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
I'm so upset about this. Once this gets to our island of spyware the government will be able to see I spent the whole of sunday watching TV. Oh yeah, and I posted here. And checked my email.
Fuckit - bomb bomb bomb!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am not sure are they allowed to save the data, but sure as hell they do use cell phone based locationing A LOT around here.
It's old news of services like locating your friends by visiting a website, getting closest restaurants, pubs, kiosks, supermarkets etc. to your phone as SMS from your service provider etc.
As well as police have the right to track all cell phones, and even lock out any cell phone permanently if stolen. (Some even claim that finnish cell phones have a destructive method to do that, frying the circuitry literally)
If you steal a cell phone around here, you are either insanely stupid, or VERY clever and know howto bypass all that, however, the cell phone locking might not be avoidable with all phones.
Also, it is rumoured that police here has so sophisticated hardware that they can pinpoint if a driver is speaking to a cell while driving and cut the connection.
Anyways, not sure can they store the data where you are, or even actively keep looking, but wouldn't really surprise me.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
No one has released your CV into the wild other than you or someone violating privacy laws. You have the option in most countries of maintaining an unlisted number and address. You can elect to be removed from most on-line directories as well. You also have the more extreme option of doing without a cell phone.
To my knowledge, no one has released specific arbitrary numbers and the locations associated with them. Most importantly, each cell tower serves an area hundreds of yards to perhaps a mile or more in radius, so the knowledge of which cell tower was used does not provide an address, but a rather large circle. It is possible to triangulate a cell phone's position between multiple towers, but TFA made no mention of trangulation.
Cell phone companies must track the tower to which your cell is closest, else you would never receive a call.
Avoid unjustified FUD.
Invenio via vel creo
Note that all US mobile carriers are required to track or have the ability to track phone location to comply with the 911 laws.
Key issue in the US is whether cell phone location falls under "common carrier" or "business record" legal status. If it is covered by "common carrier", then like the contents of your conversation, you have an expectation of privacy, police need a warrant to obtain the information and the cell phone company can not sell or use the information for other purposes.
If phone location is regarded as a "business record" you don't have any of those protections. Many of the fancy personalized advertising models depend on the phone companies ability to "publish" your location. Billions of dollars in potential profit are at stake here so do not make assumptions, but the potential for abuse is enormous.
Statesman
Umm, I wasn't aware that you can "vote out" a telco. (Or we would have voted out the dimwits from the Deutsche Telekom a long time ago.) Much less that you can vote out some researcher which doesn't even live there.
There were some data retention and privacy laws that were definitely broken. Which I strongly suspect is why they put an explicit condition to not be named. And from there it's up to the police and courts to apply those laws. I don't think you can vote on _that_. And it's probably better so, because justice isn't and shouldn't be a popularity contest.
The voting in and out has to do with the fact that we got those laws in the first place. You know, instead of weasel arguments about how the 4th amendment doesn't apply (A) to the government (then to who the heck _does_ the US constitution apply?), or (B) if it wasn't literally your papers or house being searched, or (C) by conveniently defining that if it happened over some company's lines, it's in public and noone really needs a warrant to observe that, or (D) if it allows a company to earn a few more bucks, or a few other variations.
And _if_ any politician wanted to make this thing legal, or give them a free pass, _then_ we'll vote him out. But I really doubt that they will. At worst we'll see some impotent posturing, and claims that it's impossible to determine who and whether a law has actually been broken or the researcher in case has just invented the data. (Which I strongly suspect he'll claim, once the ball starts rolling.)
But seriously, I doubt that any major politician, at least in Germany, will want to be seen as officially on the side of letting any company sell your data to the highest bidder. Although the country did slide a bit to the right lately, it's by far not at the point where anyone wants to be seen as arguing that the corporations should have unchecked power over their customers. It would be a _very_ unpopular point of view, and their political opponents would use it to the max to their own advantage. Sometimes even members of their own coalition.
(Here elections usually don't get "won" by any party, but about some uneasy coalition of several parties, to total more than 51% between all of them. With the implication that if you make yourself extremely unpopular, you might not even need to wait for the next elections to be voted out: a coalition can reform the other way around over night, moving you from head of the winning coalition to the largest opposition party. It's not a usual occurrence, but it can happen.)
But anyway, we'll wait and see. So far it's hardly some orwellian government plot, it's just one company which broke the law. It happens in the USA too, without always meaning that it reflects some government stance. See, for example: Enron.
From here, it can go in a lot of possible directions, not just "it's the way the government wants it". If it goes the wrong way, we'll vote some politicians out. If not, not. It's really that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What makes you say that the data is centered on Germany? Have you found the actual place that matches the cell phone tower locations? could you tell the coordinates?
So what they say is that it is possible to track my position if I carry a cellphone. Somewhere Captain Obvious is having a field day.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Wrong. Just tweedle-dum and tweedle-stupid.
This "reasearch" was apparently done in Finland.
Well, let's just hope Frodo and Samwise make it before the Eye of Mordor... oh. Habits. Never mind.
Contrary to what the paper suggests, the data has not been anonymized.
You're exactly right. Give me access to cell phone location data and I'll be able to identify the individuals. If they know people don't wander far from home, then they know where home is. And where work is. It'll take all of ten minutes to add a name to a pattern of behavior. The concern becomes a group that lacks collective conscience...like the Bush administration....starts using anonymous data to look for suspicious patterns of behavior. Justifying the surveillance by suggesting that they're not spying on individuals, merely looking for suspicious patterns. Sound familiar?
Then think about how that could be abused. I was watching a news story about a local anti-terror exercise that involved the feds and local law enforcement. The DHS spokesperson actually said that any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism so anti-terror exercises get muddled together with law enforcement. Every criminal is a potential terrorist. It's happening in the banking industry. The monitoring provisions were put in place to look for terrorist activity, but now banks are reporting any suspicious transactions down to $1,000. Anyone think Elliot Spitzer was a terrorist? The monitoring program that netted him was put in place to monitor for terrorists but once it became obvious Spitzer was not funneling money to Al Qaida, the investigation continued under the mantle of law enforcement. Okay, so law enforcement starts monitoring cell phone GPS data looking for suspicious patterns of behavior, at first looking for terrorists, but since any crime potentially supports terrorism, it starts getting more widespread and granular. Going to a particular street in a particular part of town...like a mosque...could flag you. Sending money to a family member overseas or just being in the vicinity when a crime takes place. Maybe law enforcement starts using cellular GPS data to locate potential witnesses. Want to explain to the boss why the cops showed up and wanted to know if you saw anything while visiting the "entertainment" district last night?
The anonymous element is an intellectual dodge. There's nothing anonymous about your pattern of behavior, it's as unique as a fingerprint. This is real 1984 kind of stuff.
I'm more afraid of widespread monitoring than terrorism. Once you start chipping away at the edges of privacy it's hard to get back. And, right now, we're paying billions of our tax dollars to create an agency that regularly pounds our right to privacy with a sledgehammer.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Tweedle-dumb?
The (putative) sanity of the EU is not really the issue. It appears that the provider and the researchers have violated the EU legislation, and especially "Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_95/46/EC_on_the_protection_of_personal_data ).
For instance with respect to this article:
Personal data are defined as "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person..."
I'm not sure 'anonymizing after billing' as the authors did is sufficient to make the data non-personal (the gist of the article is after all that you can be identified by your stereotypical movements...)
Data may be processed only under the following circumstances (art. 7):
* when the data subject has given his consent
* when the processing is necessary for the performance of or the entering into a contract
* when processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation
* when processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject
* processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller or in a third party to whom the data are disclosed
* processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by the third party or parties to whom the data are disclosed, except where such interests are overridden by the interests for fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject
None of those conditions seem to be met...
After having worked support for a cellular fraud application, I can tell you that the reason you can see who you called for how long on your bill is that a lot of this information is stored on the cellular companies' billing systems. A lot of the networks share the same billing infrastructure. i.e. t-mobile's call record info transmits over the same network as AT&Ts, Sprints, etc, to one of a few billing providers. And with a powered-on phone sending beacon records for each cell tower it connects (and those records also get sent), it is extraordinarily easy to track movement.
Paranoid? Turn your phone off. Need to get that important phone call? Tough. Get tracked.
Can police get this info without you knowing about it? Yup. It's called a subpoena. You might find out about it later. If HLS sees fit.
american media is more concentrated now than it has been for over 3/4 of a century and more subservient to the government than ever.
You started off great and then went straight downhill. American media is more concentrated now...but American media completely dictates to government. Politicians are milked for all they are worth -- and if they don't play along, the media sinks their popularity. Or worse.
The last thing American media wants is a third party. [Politicians could care less, they are basically opportunists.] Politics in America is like religion (two poles, apart). It is also like JFK/RFK/911 conspiracy "theories" -- "Do _you_ think it was a conspiracy?" "Ooh, the intrigue." They just keep the debate alive, never resolving it. Same with vegetarianism, we hear doctors saying we should eat more vegetables, less meat -- but rarely NO meat, and certainly not in the media.
Soft drinks: we have Coke, Pepsi and...what? When you have three+ parties (like Canada), you have unpredictable voting, and if you are not careful, logical policies will emerge and/or two parties might unify to oust the third. Today American politics is fanaticism (the voters) and rhetoric -- none of which, not one speck, has anything to do with what the media/cartel will have us doing in the four years ahead.
Save time, skip the politics talk. We are all being led by the nose ring wherever they want to lead us. There's no cake, no ice cream, happy birthday.
I come here for the love
According to this article, Rome was city used by MIT researchers to create real-time maps of people moving around the city.
As you sit in your car amongst thousands of others, sweating even as the AC chugs, the question lingers: how can you remove traffic from your life? Researchers from MIT may have the answer: starting in Rome, they're using data from mobile phone networks to create real time maps of people moving around the city, giving commuters a more detailed, wide-ranging view of traffic conditions -- everywhere, not just on major roads and highways.
Essentially, with all of the GPS devices in taxis, buses, and mobile phones spread about the city, the researchers are attempting to create algorithms that can give drivers a comprehensive look at any part of the city, directing them away from traffic and accounting for the ebb and flow of congestion in real time.
This story was covered by the BBC
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Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?
... could it be ... BRITAIN?"
"Oh, I don't know
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The reason for two parties isn't because we somehow inherently love having two parties -- it's because simple game theory dictates that in a first-past-the-post winner-take-all system your best tactical option is to support the lesser of two evils. The divided-we-fall nature of the game demands this behavior.
Tactical voting in, say, a proportional representation system or in a runoff system leads to very different voting behavior (more so in proportional systems than in runoff systems). For single-candidate elections, Condorcet methods are probably the most resistant to a tactical vote deviating from your actual-who-you-wish-you-could-vote-for vote.
Look, they are legally obligated under EU legislation to carry data on EVERY CUSTOMER's MOVEMENT for a considerable period of time.
This isn't about whether or not the company violated EU laws in giving it to another private entity. It's about the fact that data is being held for the government, and is being held PERIOD.
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"at least most western nations outside the US have more choices than tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum"
There is the perception that Europeans have so many more choices when voting, because they have more parties. So, when voting in national elections, they may have a choice between the Democratic Socialists, Socialist Democrats, Labor, Tories, Greens, ad nauseam. And in local elections, the same. So they have 5 different choices of party for 2, perhaps 3 offices.
Contrast this with the US. When I vote this fall, I will have a choice of Democrat or Republican for
- President
- Representative
- Senator (2/3 of the time)
- Governor (1/2 of the time)
- State Representative
- State Senator (1/3 of the time)
- County Executive
- County Council
- Mayor
- City Council
- School Board (often non-partisan, so more than 2 choices)
- Judges (in some jurisdictions)
- And a whole bunch of other minor offices.
So I, and most residents of the US, have well over a dozen choices in our elected representatives. And in the US many voters split their ticket, voting for individuals of different parties during the same election cycle.
While the US 2-party system has its flaws, I would argue that, on the whole, the US system of elections and government is far more democratic than those systems with multiple parties, but few elected posts.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Comparing with shoreline should be easier...
One that hath name thou can not otter
OK, I want public disclosure of this data for every elected official in Washington and every registered lobbyist.
Yes, they are obliged to store non-anonymized data for a maximum period of 18 months, but that crappy legislation only got passed with the explicit provision that it may only be used for specific police inquiries.
The telephone companies are certainly not allowed to do their own data-mining or to hand over that data to varios research groups. In fact, if that has happened here, we may yet see the whole data-retention farce being reversed.
O yeah, period to you too.
I don't care if it can only be used by government agencies if the charge is speeding on rural roads which have exactly one gas station every 80 km.
If they want to tap your phone service to monitor you AFTER they get the warrant that's fine, but retaining an orwellian database is not acceptable under any circumstance and smacks of people's republic of china.
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n-qu.com is live!
"Give your child mental blocks for Christmas."
Yeah, based on the scale and the likelihood that the paths cluster around urban areas, there aren't many options other than Germany as the center of the map. But it is tricky to reproject the map properly (you basically have to guess the latitude of the map and experiment), and it assumes they haven't done anything funny such as flipping the axes or rotating the data, which would make identifying the map area more difficult but not significantly alter their analysis.
If they haven't done such graphical obfuscation I give it a matter of days before it becomes clear which carrier it is.
The map in the paper is from inside some city, and has only cell tower locations.
Step-by-step guide on how to track your own phone online: http://www.instamapper.com/diytracking.html
There is a law that requires them to collect the data, _but_ (1) only now it goes into effect, if it's the one I'm thinking of, and (2) it _does_ specify that they're not allowed to share or even access it without a court order. So, yes, a law was broken.
Look, let's put it like this: if you think your telcos, or any other company isn't collecting data about you anyway, you're an idealist. While actually requiring them to collect it was probably dumb, don't imagine that it wouldn't have happened in the USA and/or without such a law. Companies seem especially fond of collecting all the data they can.
What _does_ remain is that here we still have (1) a legal limit after which they have to delete any data that's not vital to their doing business with you. Even retention laws say, basically, that even if you're required to log that data, after X months without any court asking for it, you still has to delete it. (2) An interdiction to share it, which is what these merry fucktards did.
Both are head over shoulders over the situation in the USA, as far as I know it. It's not perfect, but it's still an improvement.
Google alone is enough example of a company pulling all available fallacies as to why they should keep your search data _longer_ than even these data-retention laws demand. It seems to me like these laws here still actually reduce the interval and quantity of data held about you. It's not as perfect as when they were demanding that it be deleted immediately, but it's still better than what unchecked corporations do on their own.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The first time I did NyQuil was 1977. It came on the market, and I was there. I said "Gimmie that!" It had a little nurses cap on it. Get rid of it, it's bullshit. If there was a nurse, I wouldn't need the medicine! So I preceded to drink the whole thing. Well back then they didn't have the warning about operating farm equipment! Obviously you're not supposed to drink it. I woke up 3 days later. I was in Rockfill, Maryland, a city I'd never been in. I was standing in front of a court house and I was married to a woman that I had never met. But goddamnit I could breath again!
When I attended the DIMVA conference I watched a presentation where the propagation of a worm was analyzed. This analysis was done with the session informations of swiss provider backbone routers (like date and time and IP addresses involved in conversations). That data was easily obtainable by the researchers by requesting it as data used for scientific research. But the researchers had to anonymize the data for the presentation, of course. But hey, if it's that easy to get to that kind of information (just pose as a researcher), who needs faulty laws?
* processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by the third party or parties to whom the data are disclosed, except where such interests are overridden by the interests for fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject
This looks like the 'catch-all' condition.
a legitimate interest of researchers is to be able to do research.
So what country was it? I guess Germany. Those freaks outlaw a lot of stuff, and regulate a lot of stuff.
You're forgetting something.
Not every country is as soft about enforcing Data Protection as the UK Information Commissioner has been made (and even that is changing). Any disclosure of the underlying data can lead to jail time in some countries, and even that is based on an assumption that the providers didn't anonymise the data before handing it out (which would be an obligation in most nations AFAIK except for the UK Government when it's planning on losing CDs).
Insert
The graphics 1a comes with a scale telling how long 100km. Thus you can scale the map until it its scale fits the scale of a map you want to compare with. Then try to place it over Eurpoa so that none of the people gets their feet wet. And also places with activity should match bigger cities if possible. There are not so many possibilities.
Image 1a is not inside city. Have you ever seen a city of the scale 700km times 700km?
My mistake, when I looked on the authors homepage for the right paper about tracking mobile phones, I came upon "Uncovering individual and collective human dynamics from mobile phone records".
I missed the paper "Understanding individual human mobility patterns" by the same author.
Both have a map as the first image.
Sorry for the confusion, your explanation makes much more sense now.
This is the silliest comment I've read yet about elections: when I vote for my city's mayor, it's not on the same time and date as when I vote for my MPP/Premier,or MP/Prime Minister, or other higher office. Why the hell would it?
You make it sound like no one else in the world votes for other local offices!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"You make it sound like no one else in the world votes for other local offices!"
:"And in local elections, the same. So they have 5 different choices of party for 2, perhaps 3 offices."
I guess you missed where I said
At the national level, I vote for 4 different offices; on the state level, 5 or more, and on the local level, upwards of a dozen. That's in toto, not on any given election day. How many offices TOTAL do you get to vote for?
Oh, yeah - and I get to vote for who my party's candidate will BE in those elections; how did the Labour decide who John Major's successor as PM should be?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Here is AP taking back its story
http://www.pr-inside.com/correction-cell-phone-study-got-review-r629994.htm
And a statement from Northeastern University
http://www.neu.edu/nupr/news/0508/Ethics_Barabasi_Rese.html