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."
And they were worried about Google?!!!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Richard Stallman (of the Free Software Foundation) calls cellphones 'tracking devices' and the last time I heard him talk he refused to carry one. It can be useful if you think of cellphones in that way (they weren't designed as tracking devices, but they're certainly being used that way now).
It's how the CIA were found kidnapping people in Italy. They'd been traced througout all of Europe by means of their cell-phones. This was public knowledge at the time of the Italian government complaints, it was public knowledge at the time that the police wanted easier access to reduce both governmental and non-governmental kidnaps, why the surprise now?
I'm not keen on the idea, but damnit the CIA example does illustrate that it may be a necessary tool for protection against governmental abuses. I'd argue that if that line is accepted, then the information should be stored in a manner that prevents access outside of a lawful enquiry authorized by a recognized court or a lawful query by the monitored individual as per the European data protection standards. How you'd enforce that is difficult.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1. You're right, at the time of the ping the system needs to know where your phone is. It does not need to have a 6 month+ history of where your phone has been.
2. Billing does not need to keep your lat and long.
3. Just because a handful of people have been tracked in this manner doesn't mean that the 6.7 billion others should be.
4. No, we as customers tell the companies how they will operate and not the other way around. If you want to operate as a government sponsored monopoly (by using spectrum purchased from the people) then you get to follow OUR rules.
Don't be retarded, there's no way they have to STORE your phone POSITION months and months back. I doubt they even have to store it at all for it to work. If it were merely information deduced from billing as in "you were somewhere in area X because you made a call through carrier Y which is only active there", that's another thing. That's not what this is. This is the systematic tracking of data beyond that which is necessary for the network to work.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Because that's how cell phones work. Cell phone companies must know where you are so that they can route your calls and data to the nearest cell phone tower.
And save it for six months?
If I recall correctly, they have to do it because of the european data retention directive.
That they know isn't the issue. That they keep the data for longer than they need to route your calls and data is the issue.
They have no* need to know where your phone was 2 hours ago, let alone last Tuesday, or 4 months ago.
* Well for provisioning purposes they likely want to know usage rates on a location/time basis - but that can be aggregate data.
The problem is not that they know were you are, is that they know where you were. They definitively don't need six months of logs of your location to route your calls.
Dilbert RSS feed
No phone company could ever be forced to divulge those sort of records simply because a customer demanded it.
We have very strong privacy protections in this country - for the telcos
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
The irony is that after your phone is stolen both police and providers will claim they cannot track the device. That surely is a very comfortable way of lying your way out of doing some useful work.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
You provide a link, and get modded "Informative", but your link doesn't support your claim.
Your link says that the FBI can activate the microphone in a cell phone that is already on. That is not the same as turning on a phone that is off.
Sadly this often doesn't turn up until after a couple of hundred posts based on the lack of that information and almost without fail the story itself remains unchanged, proudly maintaining its glaring omission.