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Beijing To Track Citizen's Cell Phones

Posted by samzenpus on from the following-the-signal dept.

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."

6 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. You mean like people do already? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    U-TDOA except it should probably be named DTOA instead. I like how they keep changing the names of this stuff so you don't catch on.

    Nothing to see here.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. fun with tracking by Torvac · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:fun with tracking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  3. Hmm... by netsharc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on." ... err, as they usually do? Since otherwise, how would the cell company know how to route a call for you?

    Of course TFA is in Chinese, and I don't know what it really says, but yeah, the very design of the cell network allows for such tracking, and there's a lot of potential for abuse there, whichever government does it.

    I guess this is in response to the Arab protests, if you as the authority can see where people are gathered/gathering, you know where to send the skull-crackers to.

    Oh, and logging individuals would make it easier to see which people (phones) show up at these things regularly, for whatever reason, so we can crack their skulls too!

    I wonder what sort of techniques can be used to fight this; multiple phones (useless since afaik you need an ID card to get a SIM card), leave your phone at home, go to "airplane mode" at a random time before the planned demo? Should the protesters buy walkie-talkies and tune to xy frequency? (The police would then just skull-crack anyone caught with a walkie-talkie).

    --
    What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
  4. Re:Just turn the damn thing off by dtmos · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...and pull the battery out.

  5. Re:Just turn the damn thing off by krenaud · · Score: 3

    Sorry, no can do. iPhones have a fixed battery and special screws.