Down from the Mountain and Being Tracked en Route
April 8, 2011
No need to chop off one’s arm if monitoring goes big time. Now everyone has heard of “big brother” and no, I’m not talking about the television show. Though it used to be just a theory spouted by crazed and deranged individuals who wore tin foil hats and swore they’d been probed by aliens, in 2011 with “the age of the Internet” firmly underway, the “big brother” concept has become a very real, very scary (in my opinion) piece of reality.
According to a report by The New York Times and reported on by Digital Trends, many cell phone companies can and do track your movements without ever divulging to the consumer that they are keeping an “eye” on them. This information came to light after Malte Spitz, a German politician, sued his cell phone carrier, Deutsche Telekom, for information that they had acquired about him. What came out was somewhat shocking but nothing less than any “tin head” could have told us about.
Between August of ’09 and February of 2010, Deutsche Telekom, recorded the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Spitz more than 35,000 times. The snippet that caught my attention was:
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,” Sarah E. Williams, a graphic information expert at Columbia University. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
In the United States it is unclear exactly what level of surveillance is conducted on consumers and what information is saved because companies are not required to divulge the information they collect…though I would argue that the documents are public record and could possibly be demanded under FOIA laws since it is not optional to opt out of consumer tracking initiatives.
Cynthia Murrell, April 8, 2011
Freebie just like a tagged bovine in the feedlot
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