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.Cell phone records are frequently used by police to track people accused of crimes, as records show not only what calls are made but from near which tower.
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.
I personally don't see the appeal of Foursquare or other applications that are location-based. I don't include location information when I use Twitter, for example. I try to be somewhat careful, despite having a fairly robust presence on the web, of telling people exactly where I live, although a quick search brings it up fairly quickly, despite a lot of old addresses being there as well, and one would just have to correlate my bus riding posts with the addresses to figure out which one is current. But even it doesn't list my apartment number. But of course all a stalker would need to do is find me at work and follow me home. I know this. But I'm not going to hand over my exact location at any given moment for a coupon or two, either. I guess I embrace technology up to a point. We can't control all the information about us, but there's some we can control, and I'm all for trying to find a balance between privacy and living in the 21st century.
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