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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.
"I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone. It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop."
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.
For a cell phone to work... it needs to know where you are !
This is because the connection or the data packets need to be routed to a radio that can physically transmit them to you. That is the radio that defines the cell. The cell is in a place. The radio has to transmit the packets to you - which is a direction within the cell.
For the billing to work... you need to keep records! Because.. the radios and the backhaul belong to lots of different people, all of whom need paying.
Now ; how many criminals/terrorists have been tracked by virtue of these records? Many.
Is it right? Well, if you want a cell phone, you have to accept this - because thats the way it works, and there is no way it will change in the foreseeable future.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
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)
I'm tempted to create a startup company where we'll pick up your phone and park it wherever you're supposed to be (your office, etc), while you run off to wherever you really want to go; and at the same time give you a loaner-phone where we'd forward your calls to you.
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.
In other shocking news... your landline provider, cable provider and isp know where you live. OMG!
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.
I mean, if I'm not doing anything wrong, what's the problem if Google, the goverment, or such, track me?
Try to track government officials and they'll tell you all about why it's wrong. It's the most amazing thing.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
OK, assume that it is a given that cell phone companies have this information. When someone is killed why do the police not simply pull the information for everyone that was within, say 500 feet, at the time of the murder? This would give them not only a potential suspect list but it would also give them a list of witnesses.
Right now, if you kill someone and keep your mouth shut you stand only about a 20% chance of being caught and convicted. You can be sure that this weighs in on the decision to (a) carry a deadly force weapon and (b) use it perhaps indiscriminately. If murderers were, say 90% caught and convicted instead of only 20% the rather obnoxious murder rate in cities might drop. It is somewhere between 0.5 and 2 murders every single day in nearly every large city in the US.
If this tool exists, it isn't being used by police. They don't have to get to pushy about it, but if they had a list of people that were in the area even if the murderer didn't have a cell phone on him at the time there is a high likelyhood that someone would have seen something.
Why wouldn't a witness come forward? There is a powerful force to discourage witnesses from coming forward in cities - they even sell T-shirts saying "Stop Snitching". Nobody wants to be a witness because it means putting your life at risk. The way things stand (with a rate of 20% of murders being caught and convicted) the police cannot possibly protect witnesses and there is a strong incentive to make sure that no witness will ever speak out. Given only a 1 in 5 chance of being convicted of killing a witness there is no way to get witnesses to place their life on hold and their life at risk for the chance (much less than 20%) that the murderer will not be out on the street looking for revenge.
http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection-malte-spitz Scroll down a bit in that article, and you can even pull a copy of the spreadsheet with location data.
It needs to know where you are *NOW* it fdoes not need to know where youw ere 5 minutes ago. Therefore saving the data is a no-no and a big privacy breach.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
By all means read the paper 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, it will give you lots of reasons for why this is a fallacy. Also recommended reading is Bruce Schneier's blog post about the subject.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
What interesting patterns could emerge from looking at cell phone location data of millions of people over a period of time, and place the lines on a map. I bet some interesting patterns would emerge. Don't get me wrong though: privacy is freedom. Lack of it, is slavery. Of course corporations, our new masters, are going to be tracking us like we would a pet, or a tagged farm animal. What else did you expect from a non human entity who's sole driver is the accumulation of more wealth by whatever means available?
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
Also from TFA: "Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail."
His phone must automatically check for new email every 7.5 minutes or so. Those would be a data transfers possibly subject to charges, taxes and inter-carrier charges that are based his location, so it's not surprising or conspiratorial that his location data is retained.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html
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.
From TFA:
In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”
“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”
In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.
If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.
Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”
AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.