‘It’s Tracking Your Every Move’
March 28th, 2011
Loading ...Via: New York Times:
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.”
“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
Flashback 2007: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
Research Credit: JH
Everyone I know thinks that I am mad because I don’t have a mobile phone. Personally, I quite enjoy the peace, quiet, and freedom of not being easily interrupted. I can just relax without checking my phone every two minutes to see if anyone sent me any kind of message to my phone or to Facebook. It’s a beautiful feeling. I love it. Seven years this January just gone since I ditched my mobile phone that I thought I couldn’t do without. I may be smug, but you won’t be able to track my location to find out WHERE I’m being smug 😉
Weekly, this exchange, and probably for the rest of my life:
“What’s your cell number?”
pookie: “I don’t have a cell phone.”
“Why not?”
pookie, shrugging: “I don’t like them.”
Who else in Cryptogonland?
My sister gave me an old ‘TRACFONE’. I call it a tracking device in my solicitation for a message. I mostly leave it plugged in some where. Handy for emerg. but usually a hassle. Reminds me of those poor dogs that wear a collar to keep them from crossing a buried wire where the fence used to be. Yuk…
All of my relationships with mobile communication devices have been distant ones over the years, for a laundry list of reasons.
A lifelong technical aptitude (and later education in com/nav, radar & laser technologies) only reinforced from the get-go that ALL such devices emit steady doses of biologically unfriendly RADIATION, and as such should be kept well beyond arm’s length if at all possible.
Which is why I’ve always stuck with systems that offered devices with speaker or headset options, to keep the XMITTER module away from my cranium & corpus at all times.
Removing the battery when not in use was also a consistent habit, both to preserve battery life (practical) and because the “tracking device” paradigm was pretty obvious from the get-go (rational) to any experienced tech cynic who grew up on a steady diet of technical & dystopian lit, sci-fi and history from more than just the winner’s perspective.
Upon relocation to the EU a few years back, the wife and I did not acquire new phones. The father-in-law’s debit contract came up when he passed away a couple years ago, and we decided to keep the paid-for device and “pay-as-you-go” contract, as there are a small number of situations where it does prove quite “handy”, which is how Germans coloquially refer to mobile phones.
The XMITR/RCVR device lives within easy reach at home (track that) — in a comfy travel pouch with the battery in a separate compartment — should we ever need to grab it on the way out the door.
We’ve spent an average of about 30 Eurobux every three years, keeping just enough minutes on the phone to keep them from cancelling the contract.
And it has genuinely come in handy those few times we’ve actually needed it.