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Cell Phone Tracking Reveals Users' Habits
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 08, 2008 04:06 AM
from the there-and-back-again-must-be-the-shire dept.
from the there-and-back-again-must-be-the-shire dept.
DinkyDogg writes "'New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.' More interesting than their conclusion, however, is how they got their data. 'The researchers said they used the potentially controversial data only after any information that could identify individuals had been scrambled. Even so, they wrote, people's wanderings are so subject to routine that by using the patterns of movement that emerged from the research, "we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location." The researchers were able to obtain the data from a European provider of cellphone service that was obligated to collect the information. By agreement with the company, the researchers did not disclose the country where the provider operates.' Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?"
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Your Rights Online: US Justice Dept. Sued For Cellular Tracking Information 75 comments
tpaudio writes "The ACLU and the EFF are suing the Department of Justice over how the government might be using GPS and location data from cell phones. With over 200 million Americans carrying cell phones, this could be pretty important for setting guidelines. We have already seen other frightening powers related to cell phones, such as 'cell mic tapping.'"
The ACLU press release is also available, and it contains links to the complaint and the Freedom of Information Act request. We've previously discussed instances of cell phone tracking in the US and elsewhere.
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Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
My typical day is: wake up, shower, go to work, be at work 8h (I don't go out for lunch), go back home, cook, eat, relax, sleep. That adds up to 2 places where I'll be, and anywhere on the highway to work. Add in grocery shopping in one of the two nearby supermarkets and you pretty much know where I'll be on any given day Monday to Friday.
On weekends it might be a bit more complex because I go to the recycling centre, eventually visit my parents or my wifes parents, go to a restaurant, the movies, but even then.... What is it going to add up to? A dozen places?
This only proves that we're routine-animals. That's all....
Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
My typical day is: wake up, shower, go to work, be at work 8h (I don't go out for lunch), go back home, cook, eat, relax, sleep. That adds up to 2 places where I'll be, and anywhere on the highway to work. Add in grocery shopping in one of the two nearby supermarkets and you pretty much know where I'll be on any given day Monday to Friday.
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Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:4, Funny)
You are a cruel pet owner.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
LOL. You do know that dogs are creatures of habit?
Of course I know that, but I've never taken it into consideration. The random wanderings do not seem to bother her. That may be because our family likes to hike in unfamiliar places, so the random walks may make her feel that we will somehow get to woodland or something. I don't know.
Tomorrow I will make sure to let her lead, and we will see how that goes. Maybe she does have a particular path that she feels is 'right' and I just don't know it.
Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
But when you are in your home ground you can quickly start habits and tracks that you are comfortable with.
A more interesting application of the cell phone tracking is actually that it can give planners a better understanding of the travel patterns for people. This in turn can be turned into effective public transportation, better road planning etc.
From a historical point of view it is understandable that humans do have very fixed patterns. If you know the terrain then you know where the threats may be and where to find food & other good things in life. This is why we feel awkward as soon as our favorite store remodels and currently all aisles are changed or placed in new directions.
Of course - if we were to live in an ever-changing world we would adapt to that too.
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Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Is that really so surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, there goes the myth of the EU saner than U.S (Score:3, Interesting)
well.. im not going to feel vindicated or anything, the implications are that orwell is rolling over in his grave fast enough to generate free energy for the entire planet if you were to assemble a turbine around him.
so now they know what youre saying, or browsing on the web, and are able to watch you marked on a map as you move from one place to another.
so, when are you voting out the people who did this? at least most western nations outside the US have more choices than tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum
Can you vote a telco out? :P (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, I wasn't aware that you can "vote out" a telco. (Or we would have voted out the dimwits from the Deutsche Telekom a long time ago.) Much less that you can vote out some researcher which doesn't even live there.
There were some data retention and privacy laws that were definitely broken. Which I strongly suspect is why they put an explicit condition to not be named. And from there it's up to the police and courts to apply those laws. I don't think you can vote on _that_. And it's probably better so, because justice isn't and shouldn't be a popularity contest.
The voting in and out has to do with the fact that we got those laws in the first place. You know, instead of weasel arguments about how the 4th amendment doesn't apply (A) to the government (then to who the heck _does_ the US constitution apply?), or (B) if it wasn't literally your papers or house being searched, or (C) by conveniently defining that if it happened over some company's lines, it's in public and noone really needs a warrant to observe that, or (D) if it allows a company to earn a few more bucks, or a few other variations.
And _if_ any politician wanted to make this thing legal, or give them a free pass, _then_ we'll vote him out. But I really doubt that they will. At worst we'll see some impotent posturing, and claims that it's impossible to determine who and whether a law has actually been broken or the researcher in case has just invented the data. (Which I strongly suspect he'll claim, once the ball starts rolling.)
But seriously, I doubt that any major politician, at least in Germany, will want to be seen as officially on the side of letting any company sell your data to the highest bidder. Although the country did slide a bit to the right lately, it's by far not at the point where anyone wants to be seen as arguing that the corporations should have unchecked power over their customers. It would be a _very_ unpopular point of view, and their political opponents would use it to the max to their own advantage. Sometimes even members of their own coalition.
(Here elections usually don't get "won" by any party, but about some uneasy coalition of several parties, to total more than 51% between all of them. With the implication that if you make yourself extremely unpopular, you might not even need to wait for the next elections to be voted out: a coalition can reform the other way around over night, moving you from head of the winning coalition to the largest opposition party. It's not a usual occurrence, but it can happen.)
But anyway, we'll wait and see. So far it's hardly some orwellian government plot, it's just one company which broke the law. It happens in the USA too, without always meaning that it reflects some government stance. See, for example: Enron [wikipedia.org].
From here, it can go in a lot of possible directions, not just "it's the way the government wants it". If it goes the wrong way, we'll vote some politicians out. If not, not. It's really that simple.
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Re:Can you vote a telco out? :P (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Well, there goes the myth of the EU saner than (Score:5, Informative)
For instance with respect to this article:
Personal data are defined as "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person..."
I'm not sure 'anonymizing after billing' as the authors did is sufficient to make the data non-personal (the gist of the article is after all that you can be identified by your stereotypical movements...)
Data may be processed only under the following circumstances (art. 7):
* when the data subject has given his consent
* when the processing is necessary for the performance of or the entering into a contract
* when processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation
* when processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject
* processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller or in a third party to whom the data are disclosed
* processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by the third party or parties to whom the data are disclosed, except where such interests are overridden by the interests for fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject
None of those conditions seem to be met...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The telephone companies are certainly not allowed to do their own data-mining or to hand over that data to varios research groups. In fact, if that has happened here, we may yet see the whole data-retention farce being reversed.
O yeah, period to you too.
Man, I wish I hadn't used up my mod points earlier (Score:2)
Re:Man, I wish I hadn't used up my mod points earl (Score:4, Funny)
Tweedle-dumb?
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You started off great and then went straight downhill. American media is more concentrated now...but American media completely dictates to government. Politicians are milked for all they are worth -- and if they don't play along, the media sinks their popularity. Or worse.
The last thing American media wants is a third party. [Politicians could care less, they are basi
Data has not been anonymized (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know the exact legal situation in every European country. However, in EU countries this is regulated by the Directive on the protection of personal data [wikipedia.org], which requires for scientific use that safeguards have to be taken to prevent the identification of individuals. For some countries like Germany this means that the data has to be anonymized, although it is a grey area whether pseudonymization is sufficient.
More details on that matter can be found on my blog [quantenblog.net].
I Disagree (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, this is different from claiming that the data would be used for statistical puroposes only. This study used the data for sample correlations beyond bulk statistical analysis.
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Census data is disseminated using the same techniques so I hardly think it's a good reason to question the results (as opposed to the ethics). Perhaps you were thinking about double-blind experiments?
There's data, then there's data (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrary to what the paper suggests, the data has not been anonymized.
You're exactly right. Give me access to cell phone location data and I'll be able to identify the individuals. If they know people don't wander far from home, then they know where home is. And where work is. It'll take all of ten minutes to add a name to a pattern of behavior. The concern becomes a group that lacks collective conscience...like the Bush administration....starts using anonymous data to look for suspicious patterns of behavior. Justifying the surveillance by suggesting that they're not spying on individuals, merely looking for suspicious patterns. Sound familiar?
Then think about how that could be abused. I was watching a news story about a local anti-terror exercise that involved the feds and local law enforcement. The DHS spokesperson actually said that any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism so anti-terror exercises get muddled together with law enforcement. Every criminal is a potential terrorist. It's happening in the banking industry. The monitoring provisions were put in place to look for terrorist activity, but now banks are reporting any suspicious transactions down to $1,000. Anyone think Elliot Spitzer was a terrorist? The monitoring program that netted him was put in place to monitor for terrorists but once it became obvious Spitzer was not funneling money to Al Qaida, the investigation continued under the mantle of law enforcement. Okay, so law enforcement starts monitoring cell phone GPS data looking for suspicious patterns of behavior, at first looking for terrorists, but since any crime potentially supports terrorism, it starts getting more widespread and granular. Going to a particular street in a particular part of town...like a mosque...could flag you. Sending money to a family member overseas or just being in the vicinity when a crime takes place. Maybe law enforcement starts using cellular GPS data to locate potential witnesses. Want to explain to the boss why the cops showed up and wanted to know if you saw anything while visiting the "entertainment" district last night?
The anonymous element is an intellectual dodge. There's nothing anonymous about your pattern of behavior, it's as unique as a fingerprint. This is real 1984 kind of stuff.
I'm more afraid of widespread monitoring than terrorism. Once you start chipping away at the edges of privacy it's hard to get back. And, right now, we're paying billions of our tax dollars to create an agency that regularly pounds our right to privacy with a sledgehammer.
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New Physics (Score:5, Funny)
Forget those losers, I wanna know about the people that can be in 2 or more locations at the time!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called MultiSIM. Same phone number can be used on multiple phones.
Though I'm not sure how GSM network would react if I cloned IMEI address of two phones to identical and used multisim with them.
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Odd conclusion (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not necessarily the type of data they collected.
Here in Europe, in some countries, cell phone companies offer a service that can reveal a phone's location (with the precision of a fraction of a kilometer/mile) at any given time from any place actually. It's useful for tracking your phone when it gets stolen, or spying on your spouses.
However, the owner of the phone must consent to this service. Any tracking (except maybe for aid in criminal investigations?) without the owner's consent would be very illegal. And I suspect what happened here, is the company collected data of such consenting owners.
Whether they consented to having their data used in research, well, that's another matter.
Re:Odd conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Europe, in some countries, cell phone companies offer a service that can reveal a phone's location (with the precision of a fraction of a kilometer/mile) at any given time from any place actually ... Any tracking (except maybe for aid in criminal investigations?) without the owner's consent would be very illegal.
Very definitely this is used in criminal investigations. In the case of the Soham murders [wikipedia.org] back in 2002, one of the victims had a phone which the murderer had turned off. In a public appeal the police said they'd sent a message to the phone, trying to trick the murderer into turning the phone on (which would reveal its location).
In fact this trick didn't work, but mobile phone location data was still crucial. Police plotted all the walking routes [mobilemonday.net] around where the phone was last located just before it was switched off, and from this found the suspect (later, murderer's) house and also disproved his alibi [bbc.co.uk].
Rich.
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Pretty sure it must be the Netherlands (Score:5, Informative)
Last year, in the Netherlands 25,000 phones where tapped (for different periods of time). These are published numbers (I could link to them but the articles are in dutch only so, well..)
In the USA, the official numbers are somewhere around 2200 phone taps (in 2007).
But that's not all; keep in mind that the USA has over 300 million inhabitants. The Netherlands has only 16 million.
So either the USA government is doing a much better job of keeping even the fact that phones are tapped at all hidden from public scrutiny, or it really is much, much worse here (in this regard, at least).
Re:Pretty sure it must be the Netherlands (Score:5, Funny)
Much worse only begins to describe it. The Netherlands have more than 10x the number of terrorists we do.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course that doesn't mean there are no illegal / secretive taps, it's common knowledge that there are (for example, by using new wiretap techniques that are not mentioned in the law police are able to circumvent the
Re:Pretty sure it must be the Netherlands (Score:4, Interesting)
And then we have NSA, CIA, DHS... Do you believe they will provide any kind of statistics? It's all about deniability.
And of course - there is a rule of evidence in the US, this means that illegally acquired evidence can't be used. So that in turn means that "anonymous tip" can be an acronym for wiretapping, which in turn can lead to other means of surveillance and evidence gathering. To add to this it's possible to do a setup to obtain plausible deniability. Why do you think that the US have so many different agencies that overlaps?
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Potential hint to the country... (Score:2, Informative)
âoeSlices of our behavior are preserved in these electronic data sets,â said Albert-LÃszlà BarabÃsi, an author of the project and the director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston. âoeThis is creating huge opportunities for science.â
As if the obvious Hungarian name wasn't enough, his wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] states he's lived in Hungary and Tr
My Guess? ...Britain (Score:4, Insightful)
The other day i realised that my entire journey from home to work i am exposed to at least 15 cameras along the entire journey. We have cameras on streets, platforms
While I appreciate its "there to protect us" Im afraid i dont trust the people who's job its to monitor them.
So that's why i wouldnt be at all surprised if it was the UK tracking moves - after all they are tracking everything else.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Menwith_Hill)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I pretty much agree with everything you say - but RAF Menwith Hill is a bad link; only security is provided by the MoD - the actual site and all the sooper-seekrit spy stuff is run by the US Air Force...
Mind you, my understanding of Echelon is that it's a great way to bypass annoying local laws; Canada spies on US citizens and passes the intel to the US, Australia spies on Kiwis for the NZ government, Menwith Hill spies on British citizens - all nice and clean and local intelligence agencies don't get thei
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I think that they are there more for us to think we are monitored all the time and then occasionally we may happen to end up on YouTube [youtube.com].
Some countries use it to track traffic jams (Score:3, Informative)
I would consider this a completely legitimate use of the data. However I highly doubt that it is properly anonymized, but that's a different matter.
This could explain why such data was gathered in the first place. If you can still track particular users, it is not anonymized at all however.
Re:Some countries use it to track traffic jams (Score:4, Interesting)
As for anonmyization, you may be able to track individual users, but if you have scrambled the locations so they are no longer meaningful (ie. they do not represent any real coordinate system) I guess it would be pretty difficult to unpick it. That is the x,y location information is arbitrary coordinates and not the lat/long or whatever local grid is in use.
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The upshot of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Tin-foil hat time! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny to watch headlines attempt to troll out tin-foil hat crowd. This data seems much more useful for the development of cities than it would for evil advertisers or jack-boot government thugs who can find you through any number of measures and come get you whenever they feel like it.
Personally, I don't care much about folks knowing my routine. Wow, I go to work, come home, go shopping, go for a walk, and head off to the same few places every weekend. If data for a better mass-transit system or better roads was to result, that'd be great.
Oh noes... (Score:2)
Wonder what they'll think if I attach my phone to FIDO?
Anonymnous #45 spends every nite at 45 Lexington (Score:3, Interesting)
Anonymous 1: Arrives at 10 downing st. every evening at 21:00, and goes to work at 08:00
Anonymous 2: Arrives at Buckingham every nite at 23:00, but sneaks out at 01:00 and goes to the big oak tree in Hyde park.
Anynomous 31415: Sneaks out from 45 Lexington in Soho, and goes the the big oak tree in Hyde park.
Re:Germany! (Score:5, Interesting)
The country is definitely Germany. You can get the publication in question from the authors homepage [nd.edu] Then take figure 1a (as suggested in hweimer's [slashdot.org] blog [quantenblog.net]) and lay it over some google map, appropriately scaled.
The data is definitely centered around Germany, but tracks reach to Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Cech Republic...
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Two points of interest in the Belgian case (the first probably also true for this article):
* You don't have to make a call for them to know your location. Mobile phones are being tracked as long as they're powered on.
* The (anonymized) data are being used for traffic analysis - not just congestion, but also route analysis: how many people reaching Antwerp by a certain highway enter the city, how many vi
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Re:Germany! (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you say that the data is centered on Germany? Have you found the actual place that matches the cell phone tower locations? could you tell the coordinates?
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Re:Isn't this article a bit delayed? (Score:5, Funny)
If you had submitted it back then we'd be reading it again now as a dupe. You were doing us a favour!
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