Slashdot Mirror
German Politician Demonstrates Extent of Cellphone Location Tracking
frnic writes "Deutsche Telekom is tracking its customers' locations and saving the information: '.... as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts. The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones."
to leave your cellphone turned off when you aren't using it.
The German newspaper Die Zeit who was given access to this data has a visualization of his whereabouts for the 6 months. Press play and adjust speed with the slider to the right. The data is annotated with short reports of his day glimpsed from his Twitter account and blog.
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
Free Manning, jail Obama.
They can turn the phone on remotely without your knowledge. The FBI does it routinely... so it's not tinfoil hat stuff, it's real world, documented proof type stuff.
Germany had a data retention law requiring all phone data logs be saved for 6 months. It was ruled unconstitutional on March 2, 2010. So during the time period of the records in question, Deutsche Telekom was simply complying with German law.