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 ...
I was watching a special on Discovery called, Track me if you can. This guy talked about all the ways that our movements can be tracked. One thing he mentioned was that some tire manufacturers now put a tracking device in the tires. I didn’t know about that.
“Replace “John Doe was murdered” with “AlexW attended a Tea Party rally”.
I understand your point, but you forget, my SIM has no name associated with it.
Of course, if you want to go to extremes, maybe their data base can analyze every phone that was in range of a given tower, at a given time, and trace every number that the given phone had been in contact with over however many days.
In my area, it would be quite a task, as I do not know anyone who is on a contract or has a phone with their name registered to the SIM chip, and EVERYONE here has a cell phone.
It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Of course AT&T knows who to bill a long distance call.
Most, if not all SIMs in the USA has a name and address associated with it.
“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.”
Consumer pays for advertizing & marketing, always. Not just in the interweb era.
It’s all the more reason NOT to have one of those anchors.
That’s downright creepy; we’ve lost our privacy completely.
If you turn your cell phone off you can’t be tracked. There is a fee that parents pay to monitor their kids online it only works if their cell is on.
You can buy prepaids .. Verizon and Net 10 I have used. You do not have to register your info to use them. just open the case and pop in the battery and your pretty much good to go. The plans they are offering are getting better and better, for 50 dollars now you can get unlimed talk/text/web plans. You cant get the top of the line phones but who cares. The anonymity is worth it.
Watch Bourne Ulimatum!! Movies can be helpful at times. Theres too many cel phone conversations always going on for people to monitor. They have software listening for keywords; for exaple if you say bomb and president in the conversation they will focus in on your conversation and determine if your a potential threat or not. So dont say anything stupid on it and you will be fine.
I would have thought that most people would know that after the OJ was tracked down by his in 1994! lol
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.If Helen Keller falls down in a forest, and has her cell phone on, does she make any noise?
Yes, but it's in Braille.
This is indeed a real issue.
I have an iPad and an iPhone, and yeah, the temptation is to say “Hey, I’m not doing anything wrong, what me worry?” and leave those functions active all the time.
The problem is (and I don’t think this is so far fetched) that you could certainly be doing “nothing wrong” in your mind, but someone or some entity thinks you are, and puts you on some kind of list to track.
Your movements are tracked, the GPS coordinates plotted and stored for however long, and aggregate analyses are done of your movements. All this could be done, stored and analyzed constantly WITH NO HUMAN INTERVENTION AT ALL.
So let’s say they track you for three years, just recording all of your movements while some government/military/private bureaucrat files her nails in the background, making sure the disks don’t run out of space or whatever. This is virtually free information. It can be plotted to produce a probability map (which most likely is going to be pretty accurate with a couple of years of accumulated data. Given the time of day, day of week, you could say there is a 43% probability you are going to be near these coordinates, a 27% probability you might be THERE, and so on.
In the event someone determined that the people on this “list” needed to be nabbed (bear with me, this is just a mental exercise, not an exercise in paranoia) there are a couple of options.
First, if the user’s device is on, track it and go right to it to detain the subject.
Secondly, if the device is off, you have a probability map with coordinates that states where you are likely to be.
Stir in contributory data from ATM/Credit card transactions, Speed Pass transactions and data from cameras that can scan the plates of passing cars and identify them, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
Think about it. If in just a few minutes of musing I can visualize this, it has darn well been thought about by someone else much smarter and more focused than I am.
Sure, this would be great technology for catching terrorists. We would all (at least, I would) yell “YIPPEE!” if used to catch scumbags firing on our troops in some hot spot.
But with the ubiquity of these technologies in developed and industrialized countries where we are NOT Jihad Jamal worried about the eye of the US military finding us, but normal people loving it because it makes a lot of things really, really easy for us...we are actually MORE at risk.
Imagine this technology available to the Soviet Union in their halcyon days. Don’t you think THEY would have leveraged it to its maximum? Of course.
So, yeah. We SHOULD be concerned.
OTOH, I had the opportunity to use the technology for my own use recently. I have an iPad, and one day when I got home from work...it wasn’t in my bag. To my dismay, I could NOT remember when I last saw it. Sure, it is password protected, and I don’t have any sensitive data on it, but...it is a chunk of money.
Apple has a service you can use if you have a MobileMe account with them. It lets you easily track your device to see where it is. I sat at my computer, and even though I had never used the technology before, in 30 seconds the building where I work came up with enough definition that I could even see from the dot on the map, it was in my office at work. (yes, I could even tell that, though I couldn’t tell where in my office it was)
This is powerful stuff. Like all powerful stuff, it can be used for good or evil.
And there is always someone who will want to bend it to an evil purpose, so we should be wary.
“Just live under a bridge, walk to work, or don’t work.”
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Sounds like a plan, why didn’t I think of that? Thanks a lot ;>)
like what hotel room you are in and if there is another persons cell phone almost on top of your cell phone, etc.
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That right there is the definition of ‘Pandemonium’.
Anonymity?
How do you pay to recharge the phone? Have you ever used a credit card to do that or give them your name/address? Did you buy the phone with a credit card?
If you have only used cash and never given your name or address, I’d like to know where you got your phone, and who the service provider is. I want one of those...
my current pre pay is through Net 10. You can get them at wal mart. Yes you can buy air time at wal mart also so you can pay with cash if thats your choice. The refillable minutes are just a card with a pin number that you enter into the phone and it adds more minutes to your service. No name or address needed. Ive always jokingly called them a drug dealers phone, you can just throw them away when your done with it.
That is exactly what I was going to ask on the Faraday cage?
Anyone chime in ?
Mrs. Esopman
Doesn’t surprise me in the least.
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