Locatie gegevens iPhone reeds lang door de politie in gebruik

[zonbron]

Politiediensten waren reeds lang op de hoogte van het feit dat de iPhone locatiegegevens van de eigenaars bevat

Researcher: iPhone Location Data Already Used By Cops
The "news" that iPhones and iPads keep track of where you go has been known in forensic circles for some time

Bloomberg

[zonbron]

Apple: We 'must have' comprehensive user location data on you

Security researchers unveiled this week that Apple's iPhone was actively logging the whereabouts of users, storing location data into an easily assessable file on the device. But it's not just iPhone's that are keeping track of their users.

"We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations," the security experts wrote in their blogs.

While Apple has since remained tight-lipped on the matter, not responding to any media-inquires, another privacy snafu last year gives insight into what the company is doing with the information.

In June 2010, Congressmen Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas wrote a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs inquiring about Apple's privacy policy and location-based services

In response the company's general counsel Bruce Sewall wrote a letter explaining its practice, and shedding light on the rationale the company uses to monitor users.

"To provide the high quality products and services that its customers demand, Apple must have access to the comprehensive location-based information," Sewall told Congress in the letter.

After emphasizing Apple's commitment to users' privacy, Sewall said that to provide these location-based services, Apple, its partners and licensees, may collect, use and share customers' precise location data, including GPS information, nearby cell towers and neighboring Wi-Fi networks.


...

International Business Times

[zonbron]

Alle GSM-toestellen registreren lokaties en meer...

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know

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.


Malte Spitz was surprised by how much detail Deutsche Telekom had about his whereabouts.

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.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to 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,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with Zeit Online, a sister publication of a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

...

NYTIMES

[Juan]

Ik zie het probleem niet, het aantal moorden dat dankzij die technologie al is opgelost, is groot.

[zonbron]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Juan

Ik zie het probleem niet, het aantal moorden dat dankzij die technologie al is opgelost, is groot.

Ik zie wel bepaalde problemen, maar idd heeft deze praktijk reeds bepaalde misdaden kunnen oplossen, oa. autodiefstal, kidnapping... en dat is een positief gevolg.

Eigenlijk werd het opslagen en doorgeven van dit soort gegevens in Amerika reeds in het jaar 1996 gepland en de uitvoering van deze 'werkwijze' verplicht sinds 2001 voor alle GSM operatoren. Deze wet werd ingevoerd om 911 oproepen te kunnen localiseren.

Zie de FCC regulatie E911

9-1-1 Service

9-1-1 service is a vital part of our nation's emergency response and disaster preparedness system. In October 1999, the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 (9-1-1 Act) took effect with the purpose of improving public safety by encouraging and facilitating the prompt deployment of a nationwide, seamless communications infrastructure for emergency services. One provision of the 9-1-1 Act directs the FCC to make 9-1-1 the universal emergency number for all telephone services. The FCC has taken a number of steps to increase public safety by encouraging and coordinating development of a nationwide, seamless communications system for emergency services. The FCC has designed and established transition periods to bring the nation's communications infrastructure into compliance. In order to deliver emergency help more quickly and effectively, the carriers and public safety entities are upgrading the 9-1-1 network on a regular basis. For example, most 9-1-1 systems now automatically report the telephone number and location of 9-1-1 calls made from wireline phones, a capability called Enhanced 9-1-1, or E9-1-1. The FCC also requires wireless telephone carriers to provide 9-1-1 and E9-1-1 capability, where a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) requests it. Once it is implemented fully, wireless E9-1-1 will provide an accurate location for 9-1-1 calls from wireless phones. Other FCC rules regulate 9-1-1 for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), mobile satellite services, telematics, and Text Telephone Devices (TTYs). The 9-1-1 requirements are an important part of FCC programs to apply modern communications technologies to public safety."]9-1-1 Service 9-1-1 service is a vital part of our nation's emergency response and disaster preparedness system. In October 1999, the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 (9-1-1 Act) took effect with the purpose of improving public safety by encouraging and facilitating the prompt deployment of a nationwide, seamless communications infrastructure for emergency services. One provision of the 9-1-1 Act directs the FCC to make 9-1-1 the universal emergency number for all telephone services. The FCC has taken a number of steps to increase public safety by encouraging and coordinating development of a nationwide, seamless communications system for emergency services. The FCC has designed and established transition periods to bring the nation's communications infrastructure into compliance. In order to deliver emergency help more quickly and effectively, the carriers and public safety entities are upgrading the 9-1-1 network on a regular basis. For example, most 9-1-1 systems now automatically report the telephone number and location of 9-1-1 calls made from wireline phones, a capability called Enhanced 9-1-1, or E9-1-1. The FCC also requires wireless telephone carriers to provide 9-1-1 and E9-1-1 capability, where a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) requests it. Once it is implemented fully, wireless E9-1-1 will provide an accurate location for 9-1-1 calls from wireless phones. Other FCC rules regulate 9-1-1 for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), mobile satellite services, telematics, and Text Telephone Devices (TTYs). The 9-1-1 requirements are an important part of FCC programs to apply modern communications technologies to public safety.

fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/

Ook in Europa (E112)

Aanbeveling van de Commissie

van 25 juli 2003

betreffende de verwerking van locatie-informatie over de oproeper in elektronische communicatienetwerken met het oog op locatie-uitgebreide noodoproepdiensten

(kennisgeving geschied onder nummer C(2003) 2657)

(Voor de EER relevante tekst)

(2003/558/EG)

DE COMMISSIE VAN DE EUROPESE GEMEENSCHAPPEN,

Gelet op Richtlijn 2002/21/EG inzake een gemeenschappelijk regelgevingskader voor elektronische-communicatienetwerken en -diensten (de "kaderrichtlijn")(1), en met name op artikel 19,

Overwegende hetgeen volgt:

(1) Krachtens Beschikking 91/396/EEG inzake invoering van een gemeenschappelijk Europees oproepnummer voor hulpdiensten(2) moesten de lidstaten ervoor zorgen dat nummer 112 uiterlijk op 31 december 1992 in openbare telefoonnetwerken werd ingevoerd als het gemeenschappelijke Europees alarmnummer, waarbij onder bepaalde voorwaarden uitstel kon worden verleend tot uiterlijk 31 december 1996.

(2) In Richtlijn 2002/22/EG inzake de universele dienst en gebruikersrechten met betrekking tot elektronische communicatienetwerken en -diensten (de "universele-dienstrichtlijn")(3) wordt bepaald dat exploitanten van openbare telefoonnetwerken (hierna "exploitanten" te noemen), voorzover dat technisch haalbaar is, voor alle oproepen naar het uniforme Europese alarmnummer "112" locatie-informatie over de oproeper ter beschikking stellen van de instanties die noodsituaties behandelen. In Richtlijn 2002/58/EG betreffende de verwerking van persoonsgegevens en de bescherming van de persoonlijke levenssfeer in de sector elektronische communicatie (de "richtlijn betreffende privacy en elektronische communicatie")(4) wordt bepaald dat de aanbieder van een openbaar telecommunicatienetwerk en/of een openbare elektronische communicatiedienst de uitschakeling van de weergave van de identificatie van de oproepende lijn en het tijdelijk weigeren of ontbreken van de toestemming van de abonnee of gebruiker voor de verwerking van locatiegegevens per afzonderlijke lijn voor organisaties die noodoproepen behandelen en als zodanig door een lidstaat erkend zijn, met inbegrip van wetshandhavingsinstanties en ambulance- en brandweerdiensten, met het oog op de beantwoording van die oproepen kan opheffen.

(3) Hoewel deze aanbeveling betrekking heeft op locatie-uitgebreid 112, wordt ervan uitgegaan dat ook parallelle nationale alarmnummers met dezelfde functie en volgens dezelfde beginselen worden uitgebreid. Deze aanbeveling is niet van toepassing op organisaties die particuliere telecommunicatie-installaties exploiteren.

(4) Voor een succesvolle invoering van E112-diensten in de hele Gemeenschap moet er naar de implementatie-aspecten worden gekeken en moet het tijdschema voor de invoering van nieuwe systemen worden gecoördineerd. De Coordination Group on Access to Location Information by Emergency Services (CGALIES), die in mei 2000 door de Commissie is ingesteld als samenwerkingsverband tussen de publieke en de particuliere sector, heeft de betrokkenen uit de verschillende sectoren in staat gesteld de beginselen van een geharmoniseerde en tijdige implementatie te bespreken en het daarover eens te worden.

(5) Uitgaande van de aanbeveling van CGALIES moeten de aanbieders van openbare telefoonnetwerken of -diensten alles in het werk stellen om voor alle oproepen naar het uniforme Europese alarmnummer 112 de betrouwbaarste locatie-informatie over de oproeper te bepalen en door te zenden.

(6) Gedurende de introductiefase van E112-diensten wordt in plaats van verplichte specifieke prestatiekarakteristieken voor locatiebepaling de voorkeur gegeven aan de toepassing van het "best effort"-principe. Naarmate de alarmcentrales en de noodhulpdiensten meer praktische ervaring opdoen met locatie-informatie, zullen hun eisen echter duidelijker worden omschreven. Bovendien zal de locatietechnologie zich zowel binnen mobiele cellulaire netwerken als voor satelliet-locatiesystemen blijven ontwikkelen. Derhalve moet de "best effort"-aanpak na de beginfase worden geëvalueerd.

(7) Het is belangrijk dat alle lidstaten gemeenschappelijke technische oplossingen en gebruiken voor het aanbieden van E112 ontwikkelen. Aan de uitwerking van gemeenschappelijke technische oplossingen moet worden gewerkt via de Europese normalisatie-instellingen teneinde de introductie van E112 te vergemakkelijken, interoperabele oplossingen te creëren en de invoeringskosten voor de Europese Unie te verlagen.

(8) Een geharmoniseerde oplossing voor heel Europa zou de interoperabiliteit voor geavanceerde veiligheidstoepassingen, zoals oproepen die handmatig of automatisch door een telematicaterminal in een voertuig tot stand kunnen komen, ten goede komen. Deze oproepen kunnen aanvullende informatie doorgeven, bijvoorbeeld over het aantal passagiers in een auto of bus, over de rijrichting, over indicators voor botsingsensoren, over de aard van de lading met gevaarlijke goederen of over de gezondheidssituatie van chauffeurs en passagiers. Gezien de grote omvang van het grensoverschrijdend verkeer in Europa komt er steeds meer behoefte aan een gemeenschappelijk protocol voor gegevensoverdracht om dergelijke informatie aan alarmcentrales en noodhulpdiensten door te geven teneinde het risico van verwarring of een verkeerde interpretatie van de doorgegeven gegevens te vermijden.

(9) De afspraken voor de doorzending van locatie-informatie door de exploitanten naar alarmcentrales moeten op een doorzichtige en niet-discriminerende wijze tot stand komen, waarbij indien van toepassing ook kostenaspecten een rol moeten spelen.

(10) Voor een effectieve invoering van locatie-uitgebreide noodoproepdiensten moet de locatie van de oproeper, zoals die door de aanbieder van het openbare telefoonnetwerk of de openbare telefoondienst is bepaald, automatisch worden doorgezonden naar een geschikte alarmcentrale die de verstrekte locatiegegevens kan ontvangen en gebruiken.

(11) In Richtlijn 2002/58/EG betreffende de verwerking van persoonsgegevens en de bescherming van de persoonlijke levenssfeer in de sector elektronische communicatie (de "richtlijn betreffende privacy en elektronische communicatie") wordt in het algemeen bepaald dat het recht op de bescherming van de persoonlijke levenssfeer en gegevens van personen volledig in acht moet worden genomen en dat daartoe afdoende technische en organisatorische beveiligingsmaatregelen moeten worden genomen. Het gebruik van locatiegegevens door noodhulpdiensten zonder toestemming van de betrokken gebruiker wordt echter wel toegestaan. Met name moeten de lidstaten ervoor zorgen dat er doorzichtige procedures zijn voor de manier waarop een aanbieder van een openbaar telecommunicatienetwerk en/of een openbare telecommunicatiedienst het tijdelijk weigeren of ontbreken van de toestemming van een gebruiker voor de verwerking van locatiegegevens per afzonderlijke lijn kan opheffen voor organisaties die noodoproepen behandelen en als zodanig door een lidstaat erkend zijn.

...

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/...3H0558:NL:HTML

Ook
http://books.google.com/books?id=n15...page&q&f=false

U kan dus opmerken dat Apple iPhone,iPad,Android en anderen wel een stapje verder gaan dan deze wettelijke bepaling. Dit zonder twijfel na het inlichten en met de uitdrukkelijke toestemming van de gebruikers...

[kameleon]

Wat is het succes van facebook, twitter en mobiele apparaten ? Een schat aan informatie die nuttig is voor marketingdoeleinden.

[zonbron]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door kameleon

Wat is het succes van facebook, twitter en mobiele apparaten ? Een schat aan informatie die nuttig is voor marketingdoeleinden.

Inderdaad, en het gaat nog een beetje verder dan dat...
Een uitstekend artikel uit The Wall Street Journal

The Really Smart Phone
Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.



Apple and Google may be intensifying privacy concerns by tracking where and when people use their mobile phones—but the true future of consumer surveillance is taking shape inside the cellphones at a weather-stained apartment complex in Cambridge, Mass.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

"We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for."

Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to forms of behavior that shape us in common.

As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person, and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

The pattern held true whether people stayed close to home or traveled widely, and wasn't affected by the phone user's age or gender.

"For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other," said Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who led the experiment. "We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed."

Only recently have academics had the opportunity to study commercial cellphone data. Until recently, most cellphone providers saw little value in mining their own data for social relationships, researchers say. That's now changing, although privacy laws restrict how the companies can share their records.

Several cellphone companies in Europe and Africa lately have donated large blocks of calling records for research use, with people's names and personal details stripped out.

"For the scientific purpose, we don't care who the people are," said medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, who is using phone data to study how diseases, behavior and ideas spread through social networks, and how companies can use these webs of relationships to influence drug marketing and health-care decisions.

His work focuses on "social contagion"—the idea that our relationships with people around us, which are readily mapped through cellphone usage, shape our behavior in sometimes unexpected ways. By his calculation, for instance, obesity is contagious. So is loneliness.

Even though the cellphone databases are described as anonymous, they can contain revealing personal details when paired with other data. A recent lawsuit in Germany offered a rare glimpse of routine phone tracking. Malte Spitz, a Green party politician, sued Deutsche Telekom to see his own records as part of an effort by Mr. Spitz to highlight privacy issues.

***zie vorige post

In a six-month period, the phone company had recorded Mr. Spitz's location more than 35,000 times, according to data Mr. Spitz released in March. By combining the phone data with public records, the news site Zeit Online reconstructed his daily travels for months.

In recent days, Apple Inc. triggered privacy alarms with the news that its iPhones automatically keep a database of the phone's location stretching back for months. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that both Apple and Google Inc. (maker of the Android phone operating system) go further than that and in fact collect location information from their smartphones. A test of one Android phone showed that it recorded location data every few seconds and transmitted it back to Google several times an hour.

Google and Apple have said the data transmitted by their phones is anonymous and users can turn off location sharing.

"We can quantify human movement on a scale that wasn't possible before," said Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who works with 220 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. "I don't think anyone has a handle on all the ramifications." His largest single research data set encompasses 500 million people in Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Among other things, Mr. Eagle has used the data to determine how slums can be a catalyst for a city's economic vitality. In short, slums provide more opportunities for entrepreneurial activity than previously thought. Slums "are economic springboards," he said.

Cellphone providers are openly exploring other possibilities. By mining their calling records for social relationships among customers, several European telephone companies discovered that people were five times more likely to switch carriers if a friend had already switched, said Mr. Eagle, who works with the firms. The companies now selectively target people for special advertising based on friendships with people who dropped the service.

At AT&T, a research team led by Ramon Caceres recently amassed millions of anonymous call records from hundreds of thousands of mobile-phone subscribers in New York and Los Angeles to compare commuting habits in the two metropolitan areas.

Dr. Caceres, a lead scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., wanted to gauge the potential for energy conservation and urban planning. "If we can prove the worth of this work, you can think of doing it for all the world's billions of phones," he said.

Thousands of smartphone applications, or "apps," already take advantage of a user's location data to forecast traffic congestion, rate restaurants, share experiences and pictures, or localize radio channels. Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. routinely tracks the movements of millions of cellphones to generate live traffic reports in 127 U.S. cities, processing billions of anonymous data points about location every day.

As more people access the Internet through their phones, the digital universe of personal detail funneled through these handsets is expanding rapidly, and so are ways researchers can use the information to gauge behavior. Dr. Bollen and his colleagues, for example, found that the millions of Twitter messages sent via mobile phones and computers every day captured swings in national mood that presaged changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy.

The researchers analyzed the emotional content of words used in 9.7 million of the terse 140-character text messages posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008. As Twitter goes, so goes the stock market, the scientists found.

"It is not just about observing what is happening; it is about shaping what is happening," said Dr. Bollen. "The patterns are allowing us to learn how to better manipulate trends, opinions and mass psychology."

Some scientists are taking advantage of the smartphone's expanding capabilities to design Android and iPhone apps, which they give away, to gather personal data. In this way, environmental economist George MacKerron at the London School of Economics recruited 40,000 volunteers through an iPhone app he designed, called Mappiness, to measure emotions in the U.K.

At random moments every day, his iPhone app prompts the users to report their moods, activities, and surroundings. The phone also automatically relays the GPS coordinates of the user's location and rates nearby noise levels by using the unit's microphone. It asks permission to photograph the locale.

By early April, volunteers had filed over two million mood reports and 200,000 photographs.

Publicly, Mr. MacKerron uses their data to chart the hour-by-hour happiness level of London and other U.K. cities on his website. By his measure, the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.

Perhaps less surprisingly, people are happiest when they are making love and most miserable when sick in bed. The most despondent place in the U.K. is an hour or so west of London, in a town called Slough.

On a more scholarly level, Mr. MacKerron is collecting the information to study the relationship between moods, communities and the places people spend time. To that end, Mr. MacKerron expects to link the information to weather reports, online mapping systems and demographics databases.

Several marketing companies have contacted him to learn whether his cellphone software could help them find out how people feel when they are, for instance, near advertising billboards or listening to commercial radio, he said.

Mr. MacKerron said he's tempted—but has promised his users that their personal information will be used only for scholarly research. "There is a phenomenal amount of data we can collect with very little effort," he said.

Some university researchers have begun trolling anonymous billing records encompassing entire countries. When mathematician Vincent Blondel studied the location and billing data from one billion cellphone calls in Belgium, he found himself documenting a divide that has threatened his country's ability to govern itself.

Split by linguistic differences between a Flemish-speaking north and a French-speaking south, voters in Belgium set a world record this year, by being unable to agree on a formal government since holding elections last June. Belgium's political deadlock broke a record previously held by Iraq.

The calling patterns from 600 towns revealed that the two groups almost never talked to each other, even when they were neighbors.

This social impasse, as reflected in relationships documented by calling records, "had an impact on the political life and the discussions about forming a government," said Dr. Blondel at the Catholic University of Louvain near Brussels, who led the research effort.

The MIT smartphone experiment is designed to delve as deeply as possible into daily life. For his work, Dr. Pentland gave volunteers free Android smartphones equipped with software that automatically logged their activities and their proximity to other people. The participants also filed reports on their health, weight, eating habits, opinions, purchases and other personal information, so the researchers could match the phone data to relationships and behavior.

The current work builds on his earlier experiments, beginning in 2004, conducted in an MIT dormitory that explored how relationships influence behavior, health, eating habits and political views. Dr. Pentland and his colleagues used smartphones equipped with research software and sensors to track face-to-face encounters among 78 college students in a dorm during the final three months of the 2008 presidential election.

Every six minutes, each student's phone scanned for any other phone within 10 feet, as a way to identify face-to-face meetings. Among other things, each phone also reported its location and compiled an anonymous log of calls and text messages every 20 minutes. All told, the researchers compiled 320,000 hours of data about the students' behavior and relationships, buttressed by detailed surveys.

"Just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add financial data, you get an even greater insight," said Dr. Pentland. "We are trying to understand the molecules of behavior in this really complete way."

Almost a third of the students changed their political opinions during the three months. Their changing political ideas were related to face-to-face contact with project participants of differing views, rather than to friends or traditional campaign advertising, the analysis showed.

"We can measure their daily exposure to political opinions," said project scientist Anmol Madan at MIT's Media Lab. "Maybe one day, you would be able to download a phone app to measure how much Republican or Democratic exposure you are getting and, depending on what side you're on, give you a warning."

As a reward when the experiment was done, the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at [email protected]

Wall Street Journal

[Nr.10]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door kameleon

Wat is het succes van facebook, twitter en mobiele apparaten ? Een schat aan informatie die nuttig is voor marketingdoeleinden.

De multinationals lachen ons vierkant uit.

[zonbron]

Ook microsoft...

April 25, 2011 10:30 PM PDT
Microsoft collects locations of Windows phone users

Like Apple and Google, Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile operating system.
Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude.
A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to answer questions that CNET posed this afternoon, including how long the location histories are stored and how frequently the phone's coordinates are transmitted over the Internet. Windows Phone currently claims about a 6 percent market share but, according to IDC, will capture about 21 percent by 2015 thanks to Microsoft's partnership with Nokia.


Meer

[Ratatosk]

Veel gezever voor niets.

Het is toch normaal dat ze dit doen. Hoe anders kunnen ze de toestellen traceren bij diefstal.

[zonbron]

Apple naar de rechtbank, iPhone Tracking...

April 26, 2011 10:12am
Apple Sued Over iPhone Tracking




Two men have filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple over the location-based services provided in iOS 4. The practice puts users at a serious risk of privacy invasions and stalking, they argued.
"Apple collects the location information covertly, surreptitiously, and in violations of law," according to the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in Florida district court.
The issue of iPhone tracking made headlines last week when two researchers published a blog post that said iOS 4+ devices collect a users' location in an unencrypted file known as "consolidated.db." It's no secret that Apple collects this data to serve up location-based services, but the researchers were concerned that this information is stored in an insecure manner, and transferred to a user's PC when they sync their iOS device.
Apple has not issued an official statement on the matter, but when a user emailed Jobs about it and mentioned that his Android phone does not collect location information, Jobs reportedly responded: "Oh yes they do. We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false."
That statement did not appease Vikram Ajjampur of Florida or William Devito of New York, who filed suit over the reports.
The duo claim that "users of Apple products have ... no way to prevent Apple from collecting this information because even if users disable the iPhone and iPad GPS components, Apple's tracking system remains fully functional."
In a test, PCMag found that turning off location services appeared to stop the collection of data, though this occured over a 45-minute period and Apple has not revealed when exactly it collects data from peoples' phones.
Ajjampur and Devito, however, who own an iPhone and 3G iPad, respectively, said Apple is collecting information about which even employers and spouses might not be aware. Users are being "personally tracked just as if by a tracking device for which a court-ordered warrant could ordinarily be required," they said.

Meer

[zonbron]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Ratatosk

Veel gezever voor niets.

Het is toch normaal dat ze dit doen. Hoe anders kunnen ze de toestellen traceren bij diefstal.

Tut tut, het is wel zever.
Al van de IMEI gehoord ?

The International Mobile Equipment Identity or IMEI is a number, usually unique, to identify GSM, WCDMA, and iDEN mobile phones, as well as some satellite phones. It is usually found printed inside the battery compartment of the phone. It can also be displayed on the screen of the phone by entering *#06# into the keypad on most phones.
The IMEI number is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing the network in that country. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone's SIM is changed.
The IMEI is only used for identifying the device and has no permanent or semi-permanent relation to the subscriber. Instead, the subscriber is identified by transmission of an IMSI number, which is stored on a SIM card that can (in theory) be transferred to any handset. However, many network and security features are enabled by knowing the current device being used by a subscriber.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna...pment_Identity

U kunt steeds zelf uw eigen spy en/of trace software op uw GSM zetten, dat hoeft een 3de partij niet te doen zonder u toestemming.

Denkt U nu echt dat men dit gebruikt om uw gestolen GSM op te sporen ???

[alfa16vjtd]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door zonbron

Ik zie wel bepaalde problemen, maar idd heeft deze praktijk reeds bepaalde misdaden kunnen oplossen, oa. autodiefstal, kidnapping... en dat is een positief gevolg.

Eigenlijk werd het opslagen en doorgeven van dit soort gegevens in Amerika reeds in het jaar 1996 gepland en de uitvoering van deze 'werkwijze' verplicht sinds 2001 voor alle GSM operatoren. Deze wet werd ingevoerd om 911 oproepen te kunnen localiseren.

Zie de FCC regulatie E911



Ook in Europa (E112)



U kan dus opmerken dat Apple iPhone,iPad,Android en anderen wel een stapje verder gaan dan deze wettelijke bepaling. Dit zonder twijfel na het inlichten en met de uitdrukkelijke toestemming van de gebruikers...

Wat is de volgende stap? Iedereen verplicht een chip in de nek met ingebouwde gps,.... dit zou het perfecte middel zijn om een totalitair regime in te voeren. Momenteel moet men voor lokalisatie van een persoon eerst een procurreur raadplegen en dan kan men pas de lokatie aanvragen waar de gsm het laatst gespot is. Bij IPHONES en dergelijke kan je zelfs je lokatie delen met vrienden. Je kan je gps echter uitzetten (de vraag is echter of die geen locatiegegevens doorstuurt)

[filosoof]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Juan

Ik zie het probleem niet, het aantal moorden dat dankzij die technologie al is opgelost, is groot.

GSM-localisatie was een deel van de bewijsvoering van het O.M. tegen Leopold Storme dacht ik.

Mijn oude Nokia geeft me in het buitenland soms de localisatie van de mast die hij oppikt. In België gebeurde me dat nog niet. Discretere masten?

[alfa16vjtd]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door filosoof

GSM-localisatie was een deel van de bewijsvoering van het O.M. tegen Leopold Storme dacht ik.

Mijn oude Nokia geeft me in het buitenland soms de localisatie van de mast die hij oppikt. In België gebeurde me dat nog niet. Discretere masten?

Inderdaad, daaraan hebben ze gezien dat hij weldegelijk in Brussel was en niet ergens anders.

[Nr.10]

Apple Says They are Not Tracking You in Official Response
27 apr 2011

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied" (Otto von Bismarc)

[zonbron]

TomTom. Nieuwe Licentievoorwaarden ?

TomTom stopt verkoop van reisgegevens aan politie
woensdag 27 april 2011 20:40



TomTom gaat licentievoorwaarden voor zijn navigatiesystemen aanpassen om te voorkomen dat reisinformatie van klanten gebruikt wordt door de politie. Dat valt op te maken uit een verklaring van TomTomtopman Harold Goddijn woensdag aan de klanten.


Hij reageerde op berichten dat reisinformatie die door het bedrijf wordt verzameld en beschikbaar is voor gemeenten en provincie, ook door de politie wordt gebruikt.

Snelheidscontroles
Mede aan de hand van die informatie bepalen sommige korpsen waar snelheidscontroles plaatsvinden.

TomTom registreert het rijgedrag van automobilisten in de apparaten. Als de eigenaar het navigatiesysteem koppelt aan zijn computer, bijvoorbeeld om nieuwe wegenkaarten op te slaan, vraagt het bedrijf of gegevens anoniem mogen worden opgeslagen. Dat zou zijn 'om de producten van TomTom te verbeteren'.

Vandaag brak verontwaardiging uit omdat de politie die gegevens van TomTom koopt en vervolgens gebruikt om plaatsen voor snelheidscontroles te bepalen en de beste plekken voor flitspalen uit te kiezen.

Slinks
De ANWB vindt dat gebruikers van een TomTom beter door het bedrijf moeten worden geïnformeerd. 'De gebruiker beseft ongetwijfeld niet dat hijzelf de politie informeert. Dat mag niet op slinkse wijze gebeuren,' zegt een ANWB-woordvoerder.

'Wij hebben dit soort gebruik niet voorzien en veel van onze klanten zijn er ook niet gelukkig mee,' schrijft Goddijn.

'We zullen daarom bepalingen opnemen in onze licentievoorwaarden om dit type gebruik in de toekomst te voorkomen.'

Door Arne Hankel

elsevier

[zonbron]

European, German authorities assess implications of iPhone tracking



Apple's iPhone and iPad have secretly been saving a complete, unencrypted history of location data for nearly a year now. Privacy advocates say the practice is irresponsible, and authorities question its legality.


Many functions on Apple's wildly popular iPhone and iPad rely on users' physical locations to deliver services like real-time maps, and location-based social networking and commercial offerings.

However, unbeknownst to most users, the devices are storing that information in a hidden file, two British researchers announced Wednesday at the Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., 72 kilometers (45 miles) south of San Francisco.

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden said the tracking has been in place ever since Apple's operating system update to iOS 4 in June of last year.

"What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device," the pair wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands. Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released."

An iPhone or iPad equipped with iOS 4 stores latitude and longitude coordinates - most likely triangulated from cell phone towers - along with a time stamp, Allan and Warden said. In addition, the pair released free software which lets users visualize their own tracking file and plots it on a map.

...

Authorities reacting


According to Peter Meier, deputy director of the Bavarian Data Protection Authority - which has the most direct jurisdiction over Apple in Germany - the legal implications of the tracking are being assessed.

"We will approach Apple in a timely fashion and request they take a position, on which basis we'll judge how data protection is to be seen," Meier told Deutsche Welle.

Peter Schaar, Germany's Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, called on Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich to take action in creating a law forbidding secret tracking.

"Apple customers need to be in a position to make decisions about their data," he told Deutsche Welle in an e-mailed statement. "I see Apple as being in an obligation [to let their customers be able to make decisions about their own data]."

However, other legal scholars say that there may not be such a clear path for a legal case, as there is no firm evidence yet that the location data has been transferred back to Apple.

"But, data security standards [have been] violated," wrote Thomas Hören, a professor of communications law at the University of Münster, in an e-mail to Deutsche Welle, noting that the personal data stored was unsecure. "Users might give back their iPhones due to a clear violation of these standards. Furthermore, the high risk of damages has to be answered by Apple by [recalling] the phones or quickly establishing strategies for deleting the data and/or stopping its storage."

Haphazard and secretive

Gus Hosein, the deputy director of the London-based advocacy group, Privacy International, said his watchdog organization is already drafting legal complaints against Apple to submit to the data protection regulators of individual EU countries. It won't file them, though, until the particulars are known, he added.

"There is still the question of when Apple gets access to this data, if ever," he told Deutsche Welle. "Apple seriously screwed up here. It's time we start keeping an eye on what all these smart phone operating systems are doing. I don't know how, but over the years, location data has suddenly become fair game."

Hosein added location data can be "very, very dangerous information to be collecting, particularly in such a haphazard way."

Author: Gerhard Schneibel
Editor: Cyrus Farivar
DW

[zonbron]

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops
ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.




The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

"Law enforcement officers are known, on occasion, to encourage citizens to cooperate if they have nothing to hide," ACLU staff attorney Mark P. Fancher wrote. "No less should be expected of law enforcement, and the Michigan State Police should be willing to assuage concerns that these powerful extraction devices are being used illegally by honoring our requests for cooperation and disclosure."

A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

"Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps."

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

"With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity," Fancher wrote. "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched."

The national ACLU is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security for its policy of warrantless electronic searches of laptops and cell phones belonging to people entering the country who are not suspected of committing any crime.

thenewspaper

Opgepast met die foto's/video's van dat nachtje uit, uw geliefde, uw kinderen, paswoorden, financiele info en dergelijke op uw gsm-toestel. Toch beter even terug een oud mobieltje aanschaffen (zonder camera, 3g, gps... etc) ? Men kan heden beter een aparte 3g modem, gps en fototoestel gebruiken. Dat 'all in one' gedoe kan blijkbaar nogal schadelijk zijn voor de privacy. Mss is een 'verduidelijking' van de wetgeving aangaande privacy ivm deze nieuwe technologie nodig... Alhoewel deze in Europa toch wel redelijk streng is, denk ik. TIP: Als je dan toch persoonlijke info op uw telefoon zet, zorg er dan voor dat die in een externe geheugenchip wordt opgeslagen, die kan je namelijk steeds verwijderen. Steeds handig als je toestel gerepareerd of vervangen moet worden.