Posted on 03/26/2011 3:19:40 PM PDT by decimon
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But 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. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”
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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.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If they both have cell phone covers, we can be assured there is no hanky panky going on.
“How about a wee Faraday cage”?
Seriously, could a cellphone case be fitted to block this out? Or even wrap it in a piece of aluminum foil? (I know the tin foil hat comments are going to start now...)
It may be possible but after the phone spends a few nights reporting your location while at work, drive to and from work and sleep, it could be pretty well assumed who the phone belongs to.
Simpler is to just power down the phone. You might still need it for emergencies.
I keep mine off in the car, unless I need to make an emergency outgoing call. I turn it on at home to check for missed calls and battery strength.
“It may be possible but after the phone spends a few nights reporting your location while at work, drive to and from work and sleep, it could be pretty well assumed who the phone belongs to.
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Well, yes, they can follow a number, but it is far fetched to think they would be tracking EVERY phone to see who it might be associated with.
I can see it only if that number happened to be associated
with a serious crime, such as setting off a bomb.
Paranoia is starting to run deep in US society.
“...Take the battery out...”
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No can do w/ iphone...
Tracfones don't. That's another good reason for using them, besides no exorbitant contract.
I know of moms of teenagers that go on the computer to the cell carrier site and can see where there teenagers are.
If the phone is OFF it can’t be tracked.
Oh and there is of course a fee for this tracking.
Cage it then.
Bummer.
That limits your options.
“Take the battery out.”
Better yet don’t own a phone of any kind. That avoids records about you. Borrow the use of somebody elses cellular or landline phone, when needed.
Or just don’t use phones. It is all voluntary.
Same applies for computers, the interwebs, credit cards, etc.
Just live under a bridge, walk to work, or don’t work.
“Paranoia is starting to run deep in US society.”
How many ways are you being monitored?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2694943/posts
If you’re not breaking the law, there is no need to be paranoid I suppose. How many laws do we have again?
Here is my updated list.
1. Plans for black box monitoring of miles driven in our private automobiles to charge us with a mileage tax. They aren’t getting enough gas taxes in some states and would like to tax by the mile. Also insurance companies would like to have rates that reflect our driving habits and miles driven. Insurance companies have started giving discounts to monitor your driving habits and miles driven.
2. Thermostats / water heaters/ electrical usage meters for our houses that are tied in to a central system to monitor our energy use and at times shut off our energy to manage electrical loads.
3. Microphones on your cell phone can be turned on remotely by the phone company to monitor what you are saying even when you think your cell phone is not connected to a live call. They can do this, so watch what you say.
4. Tracking your movements by noting which cell towers are in contact with your cell phone. One person had found that the phone company had stored his GPS location 35,000 times over 6 months. All stored in the telephone company tracking database. The only way to avoid this is to remove the battery from your phone.
5. Monitoring voice traffic on phone calls for sequences of words or specific words.
6.Traffic video cameras that watch as you use the “state’s” roads. Video cameras at gas stations, malls, shopping centers.
7. License plate scanners used by the police can scan hundreds of plates per day. Alerting the police to drivers that might have legal issues, warrants, revoked driving licenses.
8. Satellite photos of your house and land. Google street view looking in your windows or open garage doors.
9. RFID tags embedded in products you buy
10. RFID tags embedded in your passport
11. RFID tags embedded in your credit card
12. RFID tags embedded in your “Easy-pass” toll paying system
13. Talk of a universal medical card that would store your medical history, treatments provided, medications prescribed
14. Every debit card purchase, every credit card purchase, every check written and scanned is stored in an aggregator database that monitors what products are purchased. These lists are purchased by marketing companies to target advertising to you.
15. The internet. Cookies, ad trackers, facebook postings, on line forums.
We’re all aware that some of this monitoring is beneficial. When they have been able to find people by noting the last cell phone tower their phone was in contact with has been a big help in finding people that have been abducted or have been in a accident. It just makes me stop and think when I see it all in one place how little privacy we have left.
It could be easily done, and while I know people think this is crazy talk, You could sell such a security measure to millions for a good profit.
Without the GPs they triangulate your location with signal strength.
Thats basically what I do
About all they know is which towers you're bouncing off of.
Well, we all have a choice, but the truth is that they entice us into giving up anonymity, and potentially freedom with convenience.
And they get us to pay for it LoL
make a sleeve of aluminum foil.
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