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Cellphones track every move you make
German case shows how much telcos know
NEW YORK: Mobile phone users, take note: Your device is tracking your every move.
German Green Party politician Malte Spitz, 26, took his phone company to court to find out exactly how much it knows about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In six months - Aug 31, 2009 to Feb 28 last year - Deutsche Telekom recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times.
The situation in Singapore, where telcos are also able to track every cellphone, is likely to be similar, said cyber security expert Aloysius Cheang, 36.
However, he added, the Telecommunications Act prevents local telcos from divulging customers' information wilfully, as is the case in most countries.
Users' behaviour does not help, said Mr Cheang, the regional director of Cloud Security Alliance.
He said: 'People were already telling their friends what they were doing on social networks, and now with the location-based services, it just adds another dimension to it. With applications like Foursquare and Facebook, it doesn't take a computer scientist for people to figure out where you are - just reading all the status updates and information about where people have checked in can let you track a person's movements.'
Most users are unaware of the extent they are being tracked, but Mr Spitz, who released the data online, has provided a rare glimpse - an unprecedented one, privacy experts say - of what is being collected as we walk around with cellphones.
Unlike many online services that must send 'cookies' to a user's computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, telcos simply have to sit back and hit 'record'.
Tracking a customer's whereabouts is part and parcel of what a telco does. Every seven seconds or so, it is determining the nearest tower so as to efficiently route calls, and where the call is coming from and how long it lasts for billing reasons.
'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 Ms Sarah Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University's architecture school. 'We don't even know we are giving up that data.'
In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons why telcos have been encouraged to keep track of their customers. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation 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 US cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.
In Germany, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr Spitz first went to court to get his file in 2009, but Deutsche Telekom objected.
It took six months before the Constitutional Court there decided that existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. A year after the court outlawed this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed.
Mr Spitz said he released the material to influence that debate. 'I want to show that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing, where they are.'
NEW YORK TIMES
Additional reporting by Tham Yuen-C
German case shows how much telcos know
NEW YORK: Mobile phone users, take note: Your device is tracking your every move.
German Green Party politician Malte Spitz, 26, took his phone company to court to find out exactly how much it knows about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In six months - Aug 31, 2009 to Feb 28 last year - Deutsche Telekom recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times.
The situation in Singapore, where telcos are also able to track every cellphone, is likely to be similar, said cyber security expert Aloysius Cheang, 36.
However, he added, the Telecommunications Act prevents local telcos from divulging customers' information wilfully, as is the case in most countries.
Users' behaviour does not help, said Mr Cheang, the regional director of Cloud Security Alliance.
He said: 'People were already telling their friends what they were doing on social networks, and now with the location-based services, it just adds another dimension to it. With applications like Foursquare and Facebook, it doesn't take a computer scientist for people to figure out where you are - just reading all the status updates and information about where people have checked in can let you track a person's movements.'
Most users are unaware of the extent they are being tracked, but Mr Spitz, who released the data online, has provided a rare glimpse - an unprecedented one, privacy experts say - of what is being collected as we walk around with cellphones.
Unlike many online services that must send 'cookies' to a user's computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, telcos simply have to sit back and hit 'record'.
Tracking a customer's whereabouts is part and parcel of what a telco does. Every seven seconds or so, it is determining the nearest tower so as to efficiently route calls, and where the call is coming from and how long it lasts for billing reasons.
'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 Ms Sarah Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University's architecture school. 'We don't even know we are giving up that data.'
In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons why telcos have been encouraged to keep track of their customers. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation 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 US cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.
In Germany, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr Spitz first went to court to get his file in 2009, but Deutsche Telekom objected.
It took six months before the Constitutional Court there decided that existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. A year after the court outlawed this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed.
Mr Spitz said he released the material to influence that debate. 'I want to show that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing, where they are.'
NEW YORK TIMES
Additional reporting by Tham Yuen-C
