German Politician Demonstrates Extent of Cellphone Location Tracking 328
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."
Christ ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Christ ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
Consumers let this happen.
Re:Christ ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Duh... (Score:3, Informative)
In other shocking news... your landline provider, cable provider and isp know where you live. OMG!
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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.
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If not that, then it may simply be that organizations err on the side of caution with data retention policies.
I don't think the real point here is that there's some abuse by mobile phone services, or that this was a secret. The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
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The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
As I imagine that is the purpose of Slashdot and as I started reading this discussion with that in mind, what would be a good solution to this problem?
Does everyone have to become a phreaker to protect their privacy? Would new laws help? How could an individual "stick it to the man" (especially if that "man" were a hundred billion dollar behemoth like AT&T)? Could a social practice, such as hundreds of people buying unlimited plans and swapping phones permanently or frequently, mitigate the effect
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I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?
I used to think of RMS as an heroic visionary, but I've gradually lost respect for him. That quote from him, calling cell phones the perfect tool for a Stalin, was breathtakingly out of touch with reality.
Look at what has been going on in the Middle East, particularly Egypt. People organized mass demonstrations with mobile phones and Facebook, which is notorious for its complete lack of respect for individual privacy. Security forces could not contain a mass movement. This is not unprecedented. Popular revo
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The problem with your Middle Eastern examples is that they are fringe situations. Countries transitioning to democracy. For us the concern is more about the rights and privacy of individuals and small groups than about the population in general.
One of the basic tenets of democracy is that people can say controversial things without fear of reprisal. In the UK surveillance of people's movements has been used to suppress their right to speak freely and protest by the police harassing them. The police and the
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There are some mobile companies which have location dependent billing (e.g. use of your phone is free if you are in your home or close). This means that location becomes a legitimate part of billing data. The equipment manufacturers have to include the possibility of gathering it. For the bills of most customers on most networks this data isn't used, but you can never tell when someone from the marketing department is going to start such a special offer. Also you can never tell when some customer is g
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Better yet, have that someone else not only carry around your phone, but also commit the crime. Then you get charged, having invoked your right to a lawyer without saying a thing. During the trial, whip out a third-party CCTV recording of you actually somewhere else, with a witness or two, and explain how you lost your phone on the train. Wham! Not guilty. And, if you're American, you get protected by double jeopardy.
Of course, the other guy better toss the phone shortly afterward, and you have to canc
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But they don't need to keep that data.
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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.
But they don't need to know where you've been for the last six months.
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Billing data is just 2 phone numbers and the duration of the call. Nothing more. I don't see how knowing your precise geographical location can make the taxation easier.
Not quite... (Score:2)
billing data != location data
Billing data is just 2 phone numbers and the duration of the call. Nothing more. I don't see how knowing your precise geographical location can make the taxation easier.
Roaming charges. [wikipedia.org]
As long as roaming charges exist, they have an excuse to track your location "because of the billing".
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No, that's not how it works - otherwise GPS and tower tracking wouldn't be such relatively new features to cell phones if it was that essential.
They can go by signal strength, I'm pretty sure they still do so in a handoff.
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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.
Strech? Why strech? It's in TFA: (Score:3)
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.)
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Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile USA. And Europe has stricter privacy laws than the US.
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In the most recent Berlusconi trial [worldcrunch.com] - here in Italy - the prosecution is working not just on the actual recording of the voice conversation over cellular phones, but the case rests at least in part on the fact that a minor spent one or more nights inside Berlusconi's villa... as demonstrated by checking what cellular repeater was covering the minor's cellphone over the night.
And this had been under scrutiny for at least six months.
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Grocery tracking can still be migitated easily. Just pay with cash as often as possible and do not accept surveillance cards ("Paypack", and whatever they are called.)
ISP tracking is a bit tougher but there are possible countermeasures to make it a less severe problem. For instance, one could write software that simulates an actual user who browses the web and pursues other online activity 24/7. This will not hide your actual activity but it gets lost in a stream of random noise.
Re:Christ ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm.. does it really upset you that much that they know how often you buy bread, and what brand of toilet paper you prefer? Why would you even think about caring about that, let alone actually get paranoid about it?
Re:Christ ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if they share that info with insurance companies, and you end up paying more for life or car insurance because they flag you for buying alcohol in an amount they consider excessive? Or condoms, or pregnancy tests.
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What if they share that info with insurance companies, and you end up paying more for life or car insurance because they flag you for buying alcohol in an amount they consider excessive? Or condoms, or pregnancy tests.
If that information was passed without consent, yes, it would be sinister. But what if you willingly allowed the information to be passed to your insurer? Then the insurer could rely on positive selection (as opposed to adverse selection of people who didn't consent) as well as monitoring to give you a better rate.
Re:Christ ... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Then the insurer could rely on positive selection (as opposed to adverse selection of people who didn't consent) as well as monitoring to give you a better rate.
Nope. If you allow positive selection for those who volunteer, that implies negative selection for anyone who refuses to volunteer, and it would be a short hop from there to assume anyone refusing to share has something to hide. Insuance companies have no "presumption of innocence" requirement.
You have to ban all tracking of such data to avoid sinister.
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> Then the insurer could rely on positive selection (as opposed to adverse selection of people who didn't consent) as well as monitoring to give you a better rate.
Nope. If you allow positive selection for those who volunteer, that implies negative selection for anyone who refuses to volunteer, and it would be a short hop from there to assume anyone refusing to share has something to hide.
It's not really different, you know, adverse/positive selection. Perhaps differential selection would be a better term.
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Oh, insurance companies don't do that. They just add all the charges to the fee and call it "standard fee". If you provide information, you get a "rebate". You don't want to allow companies to give you a rebate? What are you, a communist?
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Any info your insurance company gets will only be used to make you pay more, I guarantee it. You're not going to get any hand outs or kindness from that industry. Them having more information about you can only work against you, it's like talking to police; even when you're 100% innocent it benefits you to never cooperate.
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I've talked to the Police a few times over the years, and while you do get your share of douches, some of them are nice enough. They're just human beings too.
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Then don't buy them all at once, if you think anyone actually cares. As a kid I bought sulfur, salt peter and charcoal at one time. No one said a thing.
Re:Christ ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before 9/11, you were just a local prankster when you bought that stuff, having some fun.
After 9/11, you would clearly be a member of a small, previously undetected cell which was controlled by an international terrorist organization.
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Then if anyone actually cares, you explain why you bought it. If you are doing it for nefarious purposes, you'd be pretty dumb to buy it with anything trackable.
BTW, I never bother with loyalty cards, but I have no problem buying stuff with my debit card.
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Should we be surprised?
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
Consumers let this happen.
Well, yeah, they let it happen because they can see the use of collecting that info and therefore consent to it. The real question is whether this information is sent to other organisations, such as the government? I wonder how long it will take before someone's movements are tracked and used for police investigations. Perhaps it's already occurred.
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And a bunch of stuff we don't purchase... in all the grocery store I know about, you don't need the "loyalty" card... just a phone number that is associated with one. Nobody said it had to be your number. That said, I do have loyalty cards linked to my phone number, and I was recently surprised when I got a bunch of coupons, including one for straight up $6.00 worth of goods... for a store I almost never go to, since it is inconvenient. Turns out my kid in col
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Should we be surprised?
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
I think there is a difference between the tracking the grocery store is doing and the tracking a phone company is doing. At a grocery store, it is completely voluntary. Customers do not have to have tracking numbers (I, for one, have never had one). If they do choose to have their purchases tracked, they are "paid" for it in discounts. And that tracking is limited to what the customers purchased and perhaps the store they purchased it in.
Cellphones, on the other hand, are tracking your physical locat
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Required by current EU data retention laws... which are being challenged and hopefully overturned, and soon.
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CointelPro2 is on it's way. (Score:2)
http://www.cointelpro2.com/ [cointelpro2.com]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2967542171184509301# [google.com]
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Time to make an update version of Steal This Book.
RMS (Score:5, Interesting)
"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."
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You can just turn it off.
A cell phone is a very useful tool, just keep it turned off and use it only in an emergency and it could save your life with none of the tin foil hat stuff getting in the way.
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That's true but not very relevant. If you want to use a cell phone as an emergency notification device, you can do that without being tracked. If you want to use it as a phone, in the way that almost everybody in the whole world does -- including even many developing countries -- then you can be tracked. And most likely are being tracked. Even people who don't consider this a problem at least have to admit that this is fairly spectacular.
Okay. Yes, you can avoid being monitored by either turning off the pho
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And it works even if everybody turns off his or her phone while they're buying drugs or robbing banks. And this isn't some crazy hypothetical stuff, this data exists, you could do this right now for millions of people.
This is not a new concept for real criminals.
People who want to avoid surveillance carry a burn phone, only deal in cash, and don't have anything registered in their name or use multiple aliases.
Sure, you are definitely providing the cell phone company with valuable data. But, if you really want to get stressed out, think about how you are providing your internet provider with valuable data every time you surf the internet, your credit card company with valuable data every time you buy something, and yo
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Those are all issues. Calling them a necessary byproduct of a high standard of living is very vague.
For some of them, collecting and storing the data is inherent to the process or the technology: For a non-cash financial transaction, you typically need to know who the participants are among other things; often you need to store that data for certain lengths of time. That's certainly trading anonymity for the convenience of being able to use a credit/debit card.
The same argument can't be made for most other
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I don't think you can really get much useful evidence out of cellphone tracking for regular crimes like that. Bank robbing is fairly rare and the robber could just leave his phone at home while drug dealing doesn't worry the executive enough to warrant using cellphone data for it, never mind that the tracking resolution won't be enough to tell that somebody bought from a dealer instead of getting a pack of cigs from the kiosk across the street.
It sounds terrible that all this data is being tracked but if yo
Re:RMS (Score:5, Informative)
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[[citation needed | Can they?]]
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Mini fusion reactor.
The FBI requires it in all cell phones. It's not tinfoil hat stuff, it's real world, documented proof type stuff.
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So never but fruit phones. I never have. This can be another reason not to,
Not Bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html [cnet.com]
Yes, Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If you turn it off, you will be unable to receive calls, some of which may be of an emergency nature.
The solution to the potential privacy and political issues involved is to make it a felony for anyone, including phone company employees, and FBI and CIA agents, to retain more than a few seconds each week in any particular individuals life a record of the location at which that particular phone is and what voice or data it might be transmitting. If there is probable cause, then appropriate law enforcement
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If Flight Mode really is true, then that should be enough. But is it really???
One of many reasons... (Score:3, Informative)
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O wait.
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That's why you have a phone? I have it so that I can browse the web, and send/receive texts. When people actually phone me, I rarely choose to answer, because it's almost always inconvenient.
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Then there's always that one person who chooses to call you back instead of replying to a text.
I never answer. Trying to train them - slowly.
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Unfortunately, society seems to have chosen a different way, and the vast majority cannot choose to opt-out of participation if they want to keep their relationships and careers. Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
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Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
I've got a job exactly like that, and it really shouldn't be that hard to do, if you are working for a company that doesn't equate "job" with "indentured servitude". I do have a company-issued Blackberry, but it is only used for "system down" issues, and anyone calling for non-emergency reasons is allowed to be chewed out by me.
One way to combat this is if your manager demands your personal cell phone number, then make sure you get theirs, too. Then, if they abuse you by calling at all hours with insignif
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I'm not giving them my email address. Who knows what sort of spam I'll get. It's much better to tell them to post letters a week in advance.
Link to visualization (Score:5, Informative)
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 [www.zeit.de]
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Yeah I first saw this on Slashdot actually, early this month:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2020180&cid=35366952 [slashdot.org]
I have news! (Score:2, Informative)
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/terro
Re:I have news! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The 6 months is because that's the length of time you have to object to the bill.
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I replied too quickly.
1) They keep 6 months because that's how long you have to object to the bill.
2) Billing isn't keeping the lat/long of the phone, it's keeping the lat/long of the cell site, otherwise, it wouldn't be a blob with a direction on the map, it would be a point with a radius. It's the cell site's lat+long and which antenna (direction) is seeing the phone.
You have lose. (Score:3, Insightful)
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That is incorrect. The cell network does not need to know the location of the phone while it is not in use. The location updates improve the network efficiency and the call setup time though. Pagers necessarily worked without location tracking because pagers were passive devices. The network could first try to contact the phone where it was last seen when a call was in progress, and upon failing to make contact there, broadcast the call setup request. This functionality actually exists because cellphones do
I ahve another news for you (Score:3)
RMS calls the 'tracking devices' (Score:5, Insightful)
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They don't need to. Cell tower tracking works just as good.
It's not as if we didn't know this. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Just don't store the data for more than the next ping. They don't need to keep a record.
If they want a record to see where to put more towers up, anonymize the data so it cannot be traced to any one person.
This creates a cool new service industry (Score:3)
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.
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Or you could sell cheap pre-paid phones without requesting any form of ID.
That doesn't seem to be an option in some countries - there's apparently a mandatory requirement to request and record ID on purchase of any cellular phone. I'm tempted to pay a bum twenty bucks to pick up my next phone for me. Or get together with twenty other people to make a bulk purchase under someone else's name.
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and then you hit the anti dealer locks.
some stores have a "get caught and you are FIRED" grade policy that you can not sell more than say 3 unactivated phones to a single person.
But its not being used! (Score:3)
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.
NY Times source article (Score:3)
Bit of rationality, please? (Score:2)
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.
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.
So, each call record (CDR) comes with a "cell ID" so big meanie telco knows where were you and what network serviced you and thus how to bill you. They could save your cell registration as you move around, but they don't need that unless the police explicitly asks them to (legal requirements may vary), but this was not the case, so they didn't.
Statistical Fun and Slavery (Score:2)
This would never happen in the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Deutsche Telekom was just complying with the law (Score:5, Informative)
Germany had a data retention law requiring all phone data logs be saved for 6 months [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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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.
The irony (Score:4, Insightful)
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They didn't track the phone in this case either. They recorded the cell sites the SIM card was connected to when the device performed an action which would attract a charge. Extremely different things. Specifically, it is the lat/long/antenna of the cell site which is recorded, not the device. The device can actually be several km away, or even using a different SIM.
Carriers can mark a phone as "stolen". Once you do that, then that _device_ (separate from the SIM) will be barred from the network, along
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I mean, if I'm not doing anything wrong, what's the problem if Google, the goverment, or such, track me?
This depends also on what Google and the government consider "wrong".
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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.
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By all means read the paper 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [ssrn.com], it will give you lots of reasons for why this is a fallacy. Also recommended reading is Bruce Schneier's [wikipedia.org] blog post [schneier.com] about the subject.
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Let's see. My church is located between a brothel and a crack house. Across the street is a dealer in stolen machine guns.
Can you say "terrorist"? I know they can.