Big Brother Was a Piker

It is common knowledge that Google and gmail keep all your information forever. That’s why you get those sometimes convenient little popups advertising something similar to what you just viewed/purchased, etc. Similarly, Amazon inundates you with “if you bought X you might like Y” messages.

But what about cell phones? The American Civil Liberties Union recently obtained a Department of Justice compilation of what the cell phone companies do. Dated from 2010, but apparently still accurate.

Verizon Wireless keeps information about which cell towers subscribers' phones connect to for a year. AT&T has kept that data since July of 2008.

Verizon keeps information for up to a year that can determine if a particular phone visited a particular website.

Sprint Nextel's Virgin Mobile brand keeps the content of text messages for three months and Verizon for 3-5 days. The other carriers do not keep text content but do keep records of who texted who for more than a year. AT&T keeps records of who texts who and when for up to seven years. Virgin Mobile keeps that data for 2-3 months.

While the carriers do not record phone calls, they do keep information about calls made and received for at least a year.

Every seven seconds, your cell phone automatically scans for the nearest cell tower.A GPS chip in your phone can reveal your location within a few yards. In just one year, Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with the specific whereabouts of an unknown number of customers more than 8 million times without requiring the cops to provide neither a warrant nor probable cause to access this information. Sprint even set up a website for law enforcement agents so they could access these records from the comfort of their desks. "The tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," said Sprint’s “manager of electronic surveillance.” Big Brother was a piker.

Click here to access the full Justice Department chart.

But that’s only the half of it. Combining cell phone data with tracking the cookies on your computer and information garnered from social media sites, it is becoming possible to use this data both to identify individuals and to predict where people will go and what they will do. Any traditional assertion of privacy is rapidly becoming extinct.

Comments

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With great technologies comes invasion of privacy as well. Overall people should think of the pros and cons. Will you be able to throw away your cellphone, laptop and Ipads? If the answer is No, you're probably not that affected by the coincidental ads and preference suggestions.