[Noisebridge-discuss] Interactive mapping of your cellphone tracking you

[Jake]

This guy sued his cellphone company (in Germany) and forced them to hand over 
six months of tracking data.  All cellphone companies record the location of 
all cellphones at all times, since about 2004 in the US.

He worked with the Zeit newspaper to publish this data online and they created 
an interactive map display, which is in German but you can play with it anyway 
- it shows his location in the center, shows six months below (day by day) and 
you can press Play and adjust the speed next to the play button 
(Geschwindigkeit).

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

if you want to read the original article, it is here:

http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection-malte-spitz

and here is an article about the original article in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/media/26privacy.html

Keep in mind that Germany has some pretty strict privacy laws and data 
collection laws which limit the government's ability to spy on people, because 
after World War 2 there was a problem with a big-brother style government 
literally spying on people's every move (in East Germany) and miraculously 
people seem to have learned a lesson from that, for a while.

But now it's back to the same old story, so let's see where it goes.