Beijing To Track Citizen's Cell Phones

wan9xu writes "Purportedly to help alleviate Beijing's traffic congestion, the new initiative, literally translated as 'Platform for Citizen Movement Information,' proposes to track individual citizens' movement in real time via cell phone signals. Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on. The rest is just like the phone tracking you see every week on CSI."

Comments

fun with tracking

[Torvac]

www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
german politician got his tracking data from telekom and visualized it, just press play.

Re:fun with tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit of background info, since Google translate is hardly understandable:
German telecom providers had to store communication data of every citizen (currently suspended by the constitutional court but politicians and law enforcement already work on getting it reinstated). That data includes cell phone data. A politician sued his provider to hand over data they stored on him and then contracted a data visualisation company to create an interactive map that tracks his path on a map. Aside from his location it also shows phone usage (calls, texts, WWW) and links it with additional info available from Twitter, Blogs and Websites, if available, to tell what he was doing at a certain location.

Re:Just turn the damn thing off

[dtmos]

...and pull the battery out.