UK's 4G Network Selling Subscriber Tracking Data To Police, Private Parties 55
Sockatume writes "The Sunday Times has revealed that analytics firm Ipsos MORI and 4G network EE attempted to sell detailed information on 27m subscribers' activities to various parties including the UK's police forces. The data encompasses the gender, postcode and age of subscribers, the sites they visit and times they are visited, and the places and times of calls and text messages. Ipsos MORI were reportedly 'bragging that the data can be used to track people and their location in real time to within 100 meters' in negotiations. Ipsos MORI has rushed to contradict this in an effort to save face, stating that the users are anonymized and data is aggregated into groups of 50 or more, while location is only precise to 700m. Despite their prior enthusiasm, the police have indicated that they will no longer go ahead with the deal. It is not clear whether the other sales will go ahead."
Party! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man, private parties! I'm never invited to those!
Dyslexia (Score:1)
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Private pirate parties!
Why not? (Score:1)
Why not put everybody in jail as precaution and allowed only for school, work and couple hours of social activities.
That way, it will be easier to know about everybody's where-about.
POLICE and politicians!
Think about it!
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I'm more worried that they're *paying* for it. With taxpayer money.
Who worked out that little deal?
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm more worried that they're *paying* for it. With taxpayer money.
Who worked out that little deal?
yeah.. if they had a legal use case, they could just ask for the data.
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Try reading your service agreement sometime...
Re: Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Try reading EU data protection laws sometime, we cant sign away our rights here.
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Try reading TFA. Anonymised data isn't covered by the ECHR since it (supposedly) doesn't infringe on one's privacy.
TFA is self contradictory. It says "The data that Ipsos MORI would be able to analyse includes individual user's location to the nearest 100 metres." Further down, Ipsos MORI claims that "Ipsos MORI only receives anonymised data without any personally identifiable information on an individual customer".
At most, one of those two statements is true. The article may be badly written (no surprises there), or Ipsos MORI may be less than truthful (no surprises there either). Go figure.
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While the data has been anonymised, studies have shown that identifying information can be obtained from it.
eg. If you know where I live and where I work - then you can search the data for those locations, you've got a pretty good chance of getting my phone from the dataset. Then with that, you can now see where else I've been with my phone switched on. If there are some suspicious locations then you pull up the phones that were also in that location, search for their 'common sites' and you have their home
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Try reading the EU Convention on Human Rights - a right to a private life.
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That and I'm not overly convinced it's legal in itself to do it this way.
If they're genuinely conveying things like gender, postcode and age then that unambiguously falls under what is deemed personal data. To pass such personal data on is a very clear breach of the data protection act and even the police don't have immunity from the data protection act, only exemptions.
This implies that Ipsos Mori, EE, and the Police were conspiring to break the law in carrying out an illegal transfer of personal data.
The
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Which means that if you had any doubt that all you do with your smartphone is data for sale-- it is! And it's being sold to whomever, without anonymizing, I'll bet. Good to 700m. Yeah... right. Good to about 3m if you had your GPS on. Your applications are ratting you out, and the browser data is an open book on your life, and everything you've done with the phone.
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which is why all my apps are blocked from location services, with 2 exceptions. Obviously, this has little impact on the phone service provider, since the very act of being connected will allow them to track you explicitly.
As for browser data, I don't do much browsing on my phone, the screen's too small for general browsing in comfort and it's missing a few features I use on my computers. If you were really paranoid, you could VPN all your connection info to your home system, unless, of course, you've bun
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No. That's only a partial cure. Your services are known, your location is known (GPS enhanced). Who you called, when, etc etc. is still available.
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We are all now essentially now just GPS-collared "output generators," or whatever the current marketing-speak term is.
Yes, it is scary, but the majority of citizens will not realize it until we have another you-know-who that rises to power somewhere. Or, hey, maybe their insurance rates go up because they have some sort of profile that makes them "high-risk." Oh, wait, that last thing is already happening.
Oh,
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yeah.. if they had a legal use case, they could just ask for the data.
Sounds like it's common corruption then: government paying friends in the industry for what it should be getting for free.
People seem to care more about corruption than their rights being taken away, so maybe go after it from that angle?
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I'm far more worried that ability to sell these is given to private parties in the first place and is not under heavy legal lock-down.
Government here in Western countries more often then not both has good reasons to want data, such as to combat crime. If there were tight rules and regulation on who and how can purchase such data for all parties including law enforcement, such as one in Nordics where you typically cannot resell such private data without significant legal hurdles such as search warrant that r
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Actually, given that you could extrapolate most people's identities from the data mentioned (postcode, gender and age), this sale would be illegal under EU data protection laws.
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Margaret Atwood's "Positron" series of E-books explores the idea of a community that is set up where people volunteer to be locked up half the time so that everyone can have jobs. It's not a very practical idea (the ultimate version of the Broken Window fallacy) but it's an interesting thought experiment... a self-supporting community that is held together because at any one time the other half of the population is in jail and needs to be supported.
Paying good money for a service (Score:2)
Re:For specific groups this is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, there are legal methods of tracking people, and privacy protections for a reason. Throwing them all away for the guise of 'safety' NEVER works.
Would you like to be 'followed' because of a political or religious belief of yours, or your skin color, or sexual orientation? Open up for one, open up for all.
All you do is lose rights and privacy. You may gain a sense of safety, but not real safety.
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Oh don't rise to it. Him and SplashMyBandit are Slashdot's two resident far right fascists. They pepper every discussion with lies and views that would literally make Hitler proud (yes I just godwinned this thread) even if it's entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Interesting, I class myself as centre left and have had people accuse me of being too left wing on some issues.
Given their posting styles I'm not even sure they're two separate people for what it's worth...
I am not him, in fat before you posted his name I was not aware of him. I have read some of his posts and he does appear to have a good understanding of the the Muslim threat and the teachings of Islam, though I haven't seen his posts on other topics though
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> I am not him, in fat before you posted his name I was not aware of him.
Heh, this makes me think that maybe I am on to something and that you are both one and the same, because given the amount the two of you post there's no way you can not be aware of him - it's a blatant lie on your behalf if you're suggesting you've never noticed his posts on the same topic the two of you so dearly post no matter how irrelevant to the discussion. Something to hide?
I probably read him but did not note who he was, or that all the comments came from the same person.
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Fascists have always been of the left. Leftest continue to deny it.
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Fascists have always been of the left. Leftest continue to deny it.
Actually I think it is a two-dimensional situation, as illustrated by Political Compass [politicalcompass.org]. Though I don't know how accurate their assessments of the individuals is, I think the principle that either left or right wing politicians can be authoritarian is true.
BTW I do not consider myself to be authoritarian in general, its just that the expressed intention of Muslims to undermine our societies necessitates extraordinary measures. The freedoms of non-muslims should be protected as far as possible when a hostile
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Fascists are authoritarian leftists. Expropriating industries etc. 'Capitalist' was code for 'Jewish' in 1930.
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Fascists have always been of the left. Leftest continue to deny it.
Apparently some leftist has vandalized this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Position_in_the_political_spectrum [wikipedia.org]
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I am not him, in fat before you posted his name I was not aware of him.
Look here: http://slashdot.org/~Chrisq/friends [slashdot.org]
Yes, I added it after reading the post telling me about him
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So you're a follower then?
Seriously, there are legal methods of tracking people, and privacy protections for a reason.
Yes, it should be done legally
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If the GCHQ likes your calls to/from the UK they go for an optical link and get it all, cell tower, home internet, phone...
Your voice print will be referenced to any found in Africa, Middle East, Asia or just kept due to the calls you made. Like with calls to Ireland in the 1960-70-80-90's its all done in bulk, every call.
This story is interesting due to the 100m comment thats now in the open vs a tricky hint that extra hardware was needed or more complex inte
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We have lots of Muslims in the UK, a large number of whom say they would like to overthrow democracy and introduce Sharia law [secularism.org.uk]. Following them is a positively good idea.
No. You should never be monitoring people for believing something or subscribing to an ideology. All you should be worried about is whether or not the law is being broken or not. There is nothing wrong with saying "I want this country to be under Sharia Law and will work to make it happen" as long as the methods you use are Legal. The government should only care when the methods are illegal in nature, the goal itself (communism, democracy, islam, etc.) is irrelevant.
If there were a reasonable probability that they would act within the law then I would agree. The thing is they say that they do not recognize Western laws [blogspot.co.uk].
who's to say AT&T isn't doing this already in (Score:3)
Who's to say AT&T isn't doing this already in USA?
Verizon is already doing this, and has been for a while, according to
PC World's article about this [pcworld.com]
Verizon to Share User Location Data, Browsing History With Marketers
Verizon has posted changes to its privacy policy stating that it will now share user location data, Web browsing history and demographic information with marketers.
While Verizon insists that it will not provide third parties with any information identifying users on a personal basis, it will give them a wide array of its users' information, including websites they frequent on their Verizon devices, places where their devices have been, and demographic categories such as gender and age range. Verizon will also share user interests with marketers, such as whether they're a sports fan, own a pet or what sort of restaurants they frequent.
The Department of Justice in the USA already wants carriers to keep user location data [directionsmag.com] for further review by DOJ as needed, warranted or not.
Apple already got slogged for tracking user location data in articles [seattletimes.com] and on South Park's "Human Centipad" episode [southparkstudios.com], if you remember that. And that was followed by Android having to deal with user location tracking issues [inc.com] in May of 2011.
All of this just by searching for [ +"user location data" ] on your favorite search engine! So why aren't people up in arms about this?? Oh yeah, because not only do they accept this voluntarily, they pay the damn phone companies a monthly allotment to take their personal data and sell it! Damn sheep!
Superdickery (Score:1)
George Orwell was British, right?
We are all thinking it.. (Score:2)
At the risk of of some kind of CONSPIRACY THEORIST - pah! (aka fucking lunatic) - I say this with every fibre of my being - FUCK THE FUCKING SYSTEM! - we are all thinking it but no-one will say it.. so I will FUCK IT, FUCK EVERYONE WHO IS ON BOARD, FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOUR FUCKING COWARD FACE! FUCK EVERYONE WHO IS A BAD PERSON, FUCK THE CONSERVATIVES, FUCK THE MEDIA, FUCK THE MURDERING BASTARD CORPORATIONS, FUCK THE CORPORATIONS WHO SELL YOUR SOUL FOR A BUCK, FUCK IGNORANT ASSHOLE PEOPLE, FUCK RACISTS, FUCK