Cellphones are tracking your every move and you may not even know it

23 posts / 0 new

Sat, 2011-04-09 22:36

Catchfire

Quote:
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Six months of Malte Spitz's life, as tracked by his phone company.

Sat, 2011-04-09 23:30

al-Qa'bong

I've noticed that quite a few people carry these devices, so much so that pedestrians seem to be more occupied by their hands than by their feet, and motorists...well, they really ought to be watching the road.

I haven't any use for a cellphone, and this article reinforces my lack of interest in being enslaved by yet another unneccessary piece of technology.

Sat, 2011-04-09 23:48

Sineed

So don't carry a cell phone.

Sat, 2011-04-09 23:53

Fidel

Try like hell to avoid [url=http://www.mobiledia.com/news/85684.html]Motorola Bravo cell phones[/url], they emit the most radiation. And LQ Quantum the least. Although there is an old Chinese proverbthat goes something like, don't put your nuts in anyone's hands. They might crush them for you. And there you are with crushed nuts which you didn't even ask for. Or something pretty close to it.

he he I love countering the Motorola propagandists. They were among the first to help the feds to spy on the lives of Americans. Some of us knew then in the late 90s what they were pulling with CALEA wiretap tech built-in to phones and switches. Fascist bastards.

Sun, 2011-04-10 00:07

Boom Boom

There's probably, what, 300 million cellphones in North America now? WTF would anyone want to follow your particular whereabouts for - unless you're bin Laden?

Sun, 2011-04-10 00:25

Fidel

Boom Boom wrote:

There's probably, what, 300 million cellphones in North America now? WTF would anyone want to follow your particular whereabouts for - unless you're bin Laden?

I watched the Bourne movies with Matt Damon and written by cold war author Robert Ludlum. The character Marie was nobody in particular, just a poor girl from Germany driving a winter beater from Zurich to Paris. She also wondered why the spooks would have detailed information on her as well. Why is a good question. Why would Canada's cold war era spooks be so in a lather over Tommy Douglas as to still refuse to release his file to the public? As for "Marie Kreutz", they try to kill her stepbrother and his children. And then she is murdered by an ex-KGB agent working for a Russian mobster in the sequel. Surprise-surprise as to who that guy was working with. And the local polizias here in Canada had orders to shoot to kill people like Tommy and other NDPers in case they tried to escape police custody.

There is no rhyme or reason to fascism. Only the fascists really understand why they do what they do. They were able to track Pablo Escobar all over the world before cornering him in a middle class barrio in Medellin. He was becoming too popular with the poor and local priests. Radio triangulation revealed his general whereabouts. Secrecy in government is incompatible with democracy. A lot of people don't understand why.

Sun, 2011-04-10 12:29

Catchfire

Sineed wrote:

So don't carry a cell phone.

Would the emergence of allegations that the government is tracking your internet activities earn the response: "So don't use the internet"?

Sun, 2011-04-10 13:07

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

Just got an iPhone, love it. Especially the google map app that shows where you are on the map as well as where you're going. Sure, they know where I am - but so do I, for a change.

Sun, 2011-04-10 13:13

NDPP

thanks for further little insights into why this country is the way it is

Sun, 2011-04-10 13:48

#10

Catchfire

Timebandit, there's no need for the cellphone company (i.e. not Google) to record that information for the federal government's future use.

Sun, 2011-04-10 14:57

#11

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

Okay, but my point is that I don't actually care if they know I'm in the grocery store in whatever city I'm currently getting lost in. I also find it difficult to credit that the feds are actually paying attention to where each and every one of us is at any given time - they're not that organized.

Sun, 2011-04-10 15:23

#12

Fidel

Okay, but if you really don't care, then why not be in full compliance with police state mentality and reverse the peep hole on your front door? You could install a web cam and be a total voyeur.

Sun, 2011-04-10 17:06

#13

al-Qa'bong

...or log onto rabble.ca/babble?

Sun, 2011-04-10 18:55

#14

Slumberjack

I don't think there's anything to worry about. For the moment, most of us are categorized only as potential suspects within a CSE or CSIS electronic database. Information regarding ones acquaintences, travel history, casual liaisons such as the occasional babble get togethers, the odd protest here and there, what one texts or posts online, etc, should only be considered personally worrisome if we were facing a localized riot situation such as the G20, or a general nationwide insurrection, or any similar circumstance where they'd be interested in preventative detention. This has likely been Harkat's problem all along, these methods which could never be openly revealed to the public in a court of law. National security certificate anyone?

Sun, 2011-04-10 18:57

#15

Fidel

I don't mind the idea of government minders knowing my thoughts and personal communications, or even my exact physical-geographical coordinates at any given time. I guess it kind of reinforces the trust I have for all my closest and dearest friends in government and their benevolent telecom friends. I love their unwritten public-private partnership (deep-deep covert P3 agreements) to be omnitious and omnipresent in our lives. I am for them always. Trust and obey, it's the only way.

Democracy should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is the merger of state and corporate power. - Winston Smith, 25th President

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:12

#16

Slumberjack

And it's not like they don't have their own peculiar sense of humour.

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:12

#17

Fidel

My god youre one of those guys, SJ!! I have no alternative now but to turn you in to the matrix authorities using this personal surveillance device. Guards, seize him!

I think that the full spectrum police state will rely somewhat on the proles to police one another. Eventually there will be incentives and prizes galore for ratting on one another. And the list of oppressive and petty laws will grow longer and longer and more repressive. Eventually they will put the nix to assemblies of two or more people whether meeting in cyberspace or residences without the proper paperwork being filled out. And we all know how difficult that can be at times. Sometimes I end up asking for helpful forms and info necessary to everyday living at the bureau of information retrieval and find out that it's the offices of information dispersal I need to inquire, and that one is usually miles away. It's all designed for maximum efficiency.

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:23

#18

Slumberjack

Fidel wrote:
My god youre one of those guys, SJ!!

I was astonished about how much they knew during the initial screening interview, and the lengths to which they went about verifying things. They're not completely infallible however, but nowadays I believe they're closer than ever to it with the improved electronic techniques.

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:27

#19

Fidel

Next off we'll have to fill out some government forms for permission to leave our designated sectors for any reasons. The evil eye in the sky will be watching over us like the good shepherd.

And now I can't find that darned internet quote by General Pinochet, that one where he said there isn't a mouse stirs in Chile that he wasn't aware of.

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:37

#20

Slumberjack

I always envied you civilians for that. Less forms to fill out.

Sun, 2011-04-10 19:48

#21

Fidel

Well at one time many of us fled their repressive property and labour laws to live free lives in the forests. Royal sheriffs had a heckuva time collecting us and hauling us back to the grind. I imagine we'll have to make alternative arrangements in future.

Mon, 2011-04-11 20:26

#22

jas

Slumberjack wrote:

I don't think there's anything to worry about.

I was thinking, just the other day, that successful implementation of a fascist or totalitarian state would happen in stages, so that each time some new breach of privacy or restriction of freedom occurs, the naysayers (of which I am sometimes a part) will say, "Oh, don't be silly. It's intended for such and such. It has no foreseeable effect on any of us." We've seen a lot of these little steps in the last two decades (or more), but accelerated since 2001.

I think of this same principle with regard to the signing of NAFTA almost twenty years ago. We've seen it rear its head a little bit over the last two decades but its real purpose may not become known until the circumstances for which it was written arrive.

The question we really need to be asking with regard to cellphones is, why would they need this information? Merely suggesting that it's harmless, for people who have nothing to hide, is not good enough. The question is not whether it's "harmless", but why it's being done in the first place.

Mon, 2011-04-11 20:36

#23

Fidel

They said the same thing about Germany in the 1930s. There were small steps taken in the beginning. Many Germans refused to interpret the signs and feeling that the NSDAP were not serious. Other European leaders would take them seriously. It was a phase that would not last the decade, they thought to themselves.

Obviously there has been no night of long knives incident so far. Then we could say, aha! But there are signs nonetheless. The signs are everywhere since Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney. There is a definite trend for taking voters for granted and carrying on with their own elitist agendas regardless. Their disregard for popular opinion was evident years ago.