[109335] in Cypherpunks
Re: Israeli Cell Phones Tracking Users' Locations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Thu Mar 18 22:46:13 1999
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:30:09 -0800
To: Mixmaster <mixmaster@remail.obscura.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <199903171515.HAA10443@sirius.infonex.com>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/htmls/6_3.asp reported that Israeli cellphone
companies have been keeping computer records of [users'] phone's whereabouts.
There's a European [Swiss?] phone company doing the same thing,
discussed on cypherpunks a while back, and of course Louis Freeh wants
to have 125-meter location resolution available in real time for
arbitrary police [ab]use, with improving 911 service as an occasional cover excuse.
One outraged Israeli privacy advocate optimistically said:
> He added: "I find it hard to justify this geographic monitoring by the
> cellular phone companies and the storing of this data for lengthy
> periods. It seems to me that the authorities licensing these companies
> should call them to order and ensure that this blatant invasion of
> privacy stops."
vs. a cellphone company speaker said
> He noted that Pelephone is strict about matters of data security and
> adheres to laws ensuring individual privacy. "Data is relayed to official
> bodies after a court order is issued and is done in accordance with the
> laws of the state," he said.
i.e. the "authorities" like having this blatant invasion of privacy available,
so don't expect it to change any time soon. Several cypherpunks preferred
market pressures, which are good at getting competing companies to do things,
but aren't as useful when there are only a small number of government-approved
phone companies - it's more likely to make sure that only the government
and people who bribe or subpoena the phone company can get that information.
(The David Brin-style transparency argument is that we need to make sure that
the public can access the records to find out where government officials are,
since the technology is cheap enough that it's easy to do and the
government is going to get the information anyway.)
> [hourly records when turned on, every few seconds when talking...]
> Cellcom declined to tell Ha'aretz how long this data is kept on its
> more than one million customers. It is, however, clear that the
> information is stored in company data bases for at least six months. [...]
> Cellcom spokeswoman noted that "Cellcom charges money to cover
> the cost of producing the printout; every such operation requires the
> allocation of numerous resources, manpower and computers."
It takes surprisingly little data storage cost for this stuff;
if it's organized conveniently, retrieval can also be cheap,
and Tim May's Law says you can store data forever for only
a bit more money than storing it for a year
because storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly.
A location record can easily be stored in about 4-6 bytes for a few hundred
meters' resolution - for hourly samples, that'd be about 100 bytes/day/user,
so you could track all Israeli cellphones for about $25 of hard disk drive per day,
or $1 worth of tape, or 30 years of one phone's hourly locations on a floppy.
Obviously an every-few-seconds record takes ~1000 times as much,
but you can win back a lot of bandwidth doing compression,
with simple run-length encoding able to compress away almost all the samples
except for people in fast-moving cars and trains.
> The records are kept, Yonah explained, so that customers may be
> billed according to the time and length of their calls.
> Additionally, if in the future regional rate plans are enacted,
> it will be possible to bill calls accordingly.
> A Pelephone spokesman said the information is kept for several years
> and that this is done in order "to keep track of customer accounts and
> credits and in order to make engineering improvements in the company."
...
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
