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 users 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 customers 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 ...
Take the battery out.
Haow about a wee Faraday cage?
Be mindful of this and don’t take your phone with you while you are going to a location that you don’t want someone - anyone to know.
Haow = How
Yup
/johnny
1. Slip the battery cover off.
2. Remove battery.
3. Exhale.
Dain bramage:.....Beer Store
Dainbramage:......Home
Dain bramage:.....Work
Dain bramage:....Beer Store
Dain bramage.....Home
Dain bramage:....Work...............
Thank you. Seriously. Good to know.
What if you frequent legitimate establishments in proximity to illegitimate ones? Might someone draw inference from that?
This stuff like Google Earth is bizarre; I entered my address in Google something and there were pictures of the front and both sides of my house. Crazy...
They say you’d also be shocked how many times in a given day you’re recorded on security cameras while on the sidewalk/street.
This is great news for private investigators who will more than likely figure out how to access this information - like what hotel room you are in and if there is another persons cell phone almost on top of your cell phone, etc.
How long before cell companies start selling this data? Stalkers will be thrilled - the possibilities are endless.
Me top man!
Ping.
I always send my cellphone in the opposite direction whilst I’m engaging in illicit journeys. It took a while to train it, but was worth the effort.
“Be mindful of this and dont take your phone with you while you are going to a location that you dont want someone - anyone to know.”
_____________________________
Uhhh, don’t have a cell phone with your name attached to it.
Is that not possible in the USSA?
Exactly.
That looks suspiciously like a domestic terrorist travel pattern. Expect DHS to be checking up on you.
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