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