People are worried that the technique of mapping the physical location of a phone as it moves about can be abused by the government. The information can be used to find your location. Over time, the information will yield your travel patterns. It can be used to find out of you are speeding. It can be used to find out where you are staying, where you work, and the locations you frequent.
Well guess what? The genie is out of the bottle on this one. It has been since the birth of the cellular telephone system. The cellular service provider has to know where your phone is in order to be able to route telephone calls to it. As you move around, the service provider has to be able to seamlessly hand your call off from tower to tower. There is nothing magic about it. Click here to learn how this is done.
Enhanced 911:
Now just because a cell tower has detected your phone and established a link to it does
« Location tracking systems were required by law E-911 »
not mean that the phone company knows exactly where you are. All they know is that you are within the transmission radius of the tower, usually around 10 miles. But that has changed in the last few years. Location tracking systems were required by law (E-911) so that calls to 911 from a mobile phone could be pinpointed to a physical location. The growth of the cellular industry means that your phone can often be detected by more than one tower at a time. Using simple triangulation computations, the service provider can pinpoint the location of your phone to within yards, if not feet. This is the same technique used by GPS receivers. So, in the name of public safety, your cell phone information and your best estimated location are tracked and forwarded to emergency services during 911 calls.Location Based Services:
Since the cellular companies have to implement E-911, it doesn't take a lot to also to also use that same information for commercial purposes. The cellular service providers know this. They plan to use this for the upcoming Location Based Services. They want to be able to provide you with information about merchants near you, such as a restaurant or hotel.
Cell Network Load Analysis:
The monitoring of mobile phone traffic is nothing new either. The cellular service providers do this all the time. They have to. They log the information being collected at their cell towers. They use this information to figure out where to put their towers, and how much capacity each tower needs to be able to handle. They measure the trends of the demands for service on their towers so they can decided where they need to upgrade capacity.
Only by keeping detailed logs of what each receiver on each tower does can they determine patterns and measure the flow of users. They don't care about an individual user, but they care about how that user fits into the aggregate workload for each receiver. So, buried deep in the databases maintained by the cellular service companies, at least for a while, is a record of every connection between your phone and a cell tower receiver.
Law Enforcement Uses:
The ability to track a phone as it moves about has been demonstrated as an effective law-enforcement tool. For example, the police were able to use phone tracking records to convict Alejandro Avila for the abduction, rape, and murder of 5 year old Samantha Runnion in Orange County, California in 2002 . He claimed he was miles away at the time of the murder, shopping in Ontario, California. The cell phone records not only discredited his alibi, but they placed his phone at the location where the abduction took place, and where her body was later found, at the time the crimes occurred.
Intelligence Uses:
Although it is not publicized, and will probably be denied, one can only assume that intelligence and law enforcement agencies, such as the NSA, CIA, and FBI subscribe to the collected cellular records to monitor the movement of individuals they are interested in.
Road Traffic Analysis:
This is the crux of the CNN article. Traffic engineers have figured out that measuring the movement and density of cellular phones is an excellent way to monitor road conditions. It is a cheap and highly effective way to collect data for this purpose.
The Solution:
So the problem is that people are concerned that the data released to transportation planners from the cell tower records for road traffic analysis can be used by other government agencies who are more interested in targeted individual people. It is a valid concern, and one that can not be dismissed.
As mentioned before, that data is already there, and available to government agencies. They simply have to go to the cellular companies to get it. One hopes that they have a warrant.
" data provided to any vendor must be scrubbed clean of distinguishing information "
The solution is simple. Any data provided to any vendor must be scrubbed clean of distinguishing information. The identification numbers that tie a particular phone to an account must be replaced with a meaningless substitute number. This will allow the user of the data to still perform all the analysis, but they can not use the information to figure out exactly who owns each phone.The substitute number can have a life of 24 hours. After that, it can be reused for another account. With this restriction, the vendor can not determine the movements of the same phone beyond a 24 hour window.
The assignment and lookup table of substitute numbers must be destroyed after 24 hours and a new one built of randomly assigned numbers. Without this table, the substitute numbers can not be matched back to real accounts.
With these procedures in place, the information given to a vendor is meaningless except for traffic analysis.
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