Cell Phones Watch Your Every Move

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Malte Spitz, German Green party
politician, found out that we
are always being tracked even
if we don't volunteer to be.

Cell phone companies don't
usually tell how much
information they collect,
so Spitz went to court to
find out exactly what his
cell phone company,
Deutsche Telekom, knew
about his location.

Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28,
2010, Deutsche Telekom
recorded and saved his
longitude and latitude
coordinates more than
35,000 times. It traced
him from a train to
Erlangen from the start
until his last night,
at home in Berlin.

Spitz gave a look at of
what is being collected
as we walk around with
our phones, per privacy
experts. Unlike many online
services and web sites that
must send "cookies" to a
user's computer to link its
traffic to a specific person,
cell phone companies just
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," Sarah E. Williams,
expert on graphic information
at Columbia University's
architecture school. "We don't
even know we are giving up
that data."

"At any given instant, a cell
phone company has to know where
you are. It's constantly
registering with the tower,
strongest signal," Matthew Blaze,
a professor of computer and
information science at the
University of Pennsylvania who
has testified before Congress
on the issue.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110330120057writ.nb/topstory.html

Supreme Court Case Could Effect Most Businesses With Employees

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

It's an issue involving whether
the justices should permit
certification of the largest
class action employment lawsuit
in United States history. The
dispute is against Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. over alleged gender
bias in pay and promotions.
Arguments in the case are
scheduled Tuesday morning and
ruling can be expected by late
June.

If the class action passes,
hundreds of thousands of women
could join in the largest
discrimination claim of its
kind. Tens of billions of
dollars or more in damages.

The court case is among the
biggest of the current term,
and could establish binding
standards over liability
involving companies large
and small.
It started with six women
from California, unknown
to each other, initially.

"I'm a fighter if nothing
else, and so are all the
other women that are
involved," Christine
Kwapnoski, one of the
original plaintiffs.

Kwapnoski, 46, started at
Sam's Club retail warehouse,
part of the Wal-Mart brand,
in 1986, relocated to a store
in Concord, California.
When 2000 rolled-around, she
was the longest tenured hourly
employee at the store, but
claims she was being paid
"virtually the same" as male
associates with half her
experience. She was promoted
in 2001, two weeks after the
lawsuit was filed, and is
still at the company.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Joseph
Sellers, explains that there's
a "corporate culture" at Wal-Mart,
where female associates are
treated as second class
employees, and that the company's
"strong, centralized structure
fosters or facilitates gender
stereotyping and discrimination,"
which flows down to individual stores.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110328091100writ.nb/topstory.html