Everyone has one and most people leave them on all the time, but your handy mobile phone is actually a full-time government spy in your pocket.
The government spy in your pocket
The full and detailed extent of the data gathered and held by European Telecoms companies on the orders of the EU and member state governments has just been revealed by a German politician … and if you value your privacy, read on, its pretty startling stuff.
Malte Spitz, a German Green Party politician, and a campaigner for data privacy and civil rights has recently disclosed just how insidious telecoms data retention by mobile phone operators is.
Mr Spitz went to court to force the German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom to hand over six months worth of his phone data and on his blog he recounts how he obtained some of the 35,000 data records on him collected by the operator over a 6 month period.
In turn Mr Spitz supplied the information to the German newspaper ZEIT ONLINE. Using some of the latest widely-available Web 2.0 software and processes ZEIT mashed the geolocation data together with information relating to his life as a politician including Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites all freely available on the Internet, to produce the data-report shown below.
This geolocation data, which is widely used by Google and by applications available to mobile telephone users and advertisers, visually mapped his movements and his habits minute-by minute over the 6-month period concerned.
All this data is of course available to EUROPOL, the European Police Office and government authorities and coupled with other publically available data, makes it very simple to track swathes of most anyone’s daily activity.
Play with the geolocalised tracking data-report here. By pushing the play button on the ZEIT map, you can set off on a trip through Malte Spitz’s life. The speed controller allows you to adjust how fast you travel, the pause button will let you stop at interesting points. In addition, a calendar at the bottom shows when he was in a particular location and can be used to jump to a specific time period. Each column corresponds to one day.
On his blog Mr Spitz says: “I’ve decided to publish the data in order to show that the stored records make ones life transparent and invade ones sphere of personal privacy. With ZEIT Online I found a partner to evaluate and process the data. You can now see the result. However, you should be aware that this is only half the retained data. With a complete set of records or multiple records it is easy to discover a lot more about people and their private and social life…..Deutsche Telekom stored this data not on their own account. German and European law requires them to do so. (The basis for this is the Data Retention Directive of the European Union (Directive 2006/24/EC) enacted in 2006.) The geo-data shown is not from a GPS sensor in a smartphone. The geo-location information is based on information from the mobile cell site, so everybody in that cell with their phone logged in, was tracked at the same time. The level of my data is as high as it is, over 35,000 lines, because my phone is turned on almost all the time and I use my mobile Internet option as well as my e-mail programme and services like Twitter, quite often. However, I don’t want to communicate less, just because my mobile provider and my government are keeping me under surveillance.”
So Big Brother governments are watching you via your Internet connection, by thousands of surveillance cameras (some of which in the UK, incorporate a sensitive Orwellian listening device to pick up street conversations) and also via the personal spy in your pocket or handbag.
You still have a choice of course, turn the phone off whenever you move and for the growing army of intrusive cameras — well wear a burkha (but not of course in France)! Meanwhile hope for a clever geek to arrive soon with a gadget to confuse the trackers.
UPDATE: Others hold that privacy is the censorious domain of the authoritarian: “Publicness disarms stigmas. It provokes generosity. It increases knowledge. I have learned online how much is to be gained from sunlight” A view set out this essay in Wired magazine.
