Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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...