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

[Danny O'Brien]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, though note that EU-wide there are mandatory statutory
requirements for ISPs and telcos to store data (including location
data) for 6 months to two years. I believe the national implementation
of this directive was challenged in Germany and found
unconstitutional, but I haven't been following the story recently. (EU
directives are enforced by "transposing" them into local national
law).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention

There's no such requirement in the US, but law enforcement is
constantly pushing for it. (And there's no broad law that says that
companies *shouldn't* keep this data, either).

Declan McCullagh is one journalist who tracks the Justice department's
advocacy for this law here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20032153-281.html?tag=mncol

d.



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