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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)
...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.
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.
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'
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...
If you had submitted it back then we'd be reading it again now as a dupe. You were doing us a favour!
This is where the serious fun begins.
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...