Slashdot Mirror
Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users
asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."
No doubt this is for the good of the citizens. I hope the US follows suit soon.
/sarcasm
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
With 1B inhabitants, that's a hell of a lot of data to store. Privacy issue aside, I really wonder if there're not drowning themselfs in data...
>> within 100 meters still could mean thousands of people
All of them brightly adorned and doing a complexly choreographed, extended dance sequence.
Really, why is it that governments feel they must track our every movement, our every interaction? The answer is that governments - no matter how well they start off - all eventually end up seeking to fully control the lives of their citizens: it seems to be some sort of unavoidable emergent property of large aggregations of people. The idea of a citizen having some degree of personal sovereignty just falls by the wayside and everybody just gets swept up in the imperatives of the government. This may seem innocuous - or even benign to the naive - but the long term result is that it is a seeking of control for the sake of having control. Being traced like this can hardly be considered to be in the best interests of individual people.
For "normal" people, obviously:
There are 1,170,938,000 people in India.
The Taj attacks were carried out by 10 men.
Meaning 99.9999991% of the people to be affected by this are NOT the poster children/excuse for this kind of tracking.
It seems all the governments of the world are in a race to be the most onerous and most oppressive. They learn from each other, and so must we (normal peeps).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"Turns out you can't shut off tracking, that phones will not work if you manage to disable GPS tracking."
And this is complete bullshit. I have a nokia from 2 years ago that I can in fact make the GPS go completely off and the phone still works.
hardware Hacking with iphones also shows that the GPS is NOT required for operation and jailbroken phone show that the GPS really is OFF when set to off, same for android phones.
You know if you want to make things up, at least do a little bit of fact checking it makes people write you off right away when they see a blatent fabrication.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's not a lot of data, if you think it is then you haven't seen how much data some corporations have. At my last job I didn't even notice a stray terabyte here or there.
Let's say you end up with 1TB worth of data per day and 400TB per year. Facebook has 21 petabytes in it's 2000 machine hadoop cluster . Every day they add 12TB of compressed data and scan through 800TB of compressed data. Yahoo had 40000 machines in it's various hadoop clusters.
400TB a year is nothing. You'd need maybe 100 of those 12TB facebook like servers for that (with replication, etc, etc.). Let's say 300 across two data centers for true redundancy. A moderately sized cluster as such things go.
The cost of a server is I think $10000/year. So that all comes out to only $3million per year, make it $10million with all the usual corruption involved in such things. Basically peanuts to a government.