The telephone companies know more than Big Brother

The other day when it was published everywhere that Richard Stallman, founding father of the GNU Foundation, does not use a mobile phone because he thinks it is a surveillance device, many thought, "Once again this guy with his radical ideas and opinions." Others may have imagined a Richard Stallman like Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy", seeing enemies everywhere. The truth is that we all know that telephone companies keep a record of all our calls, SMS, emails, etc. and even our geolocation. The problem is that, as with Facebook and so many other new "cloud" tools, we are confident that these mega-corporations will do nothing wrong with it. The saddest thing is that if they were in the hands of the State we would be protesting and kicking. We still have the chip of neoliberalism: companies are good and the state is bad and persecuting. Since the data is held by companies, we trust. The most worrying thing is that there is no regulation in practically any country that regulates the registration of this information. What do the telephone companies need to save all our data for, for example? Nobody knows or asks. Today, I just read in a major newspaper in Argentina that a German citizen, Malte Spitz, asked Deutsche Telekom to give him all the data they kept about him. With them an impressive interactive map was made showing six months of Spitz's life. Stallman was right.

Who has more information about people: nation states or telephone companies? The German Green Party activist Malte Spitz was not left in doubt: he asked the German Justice to force his telephone company Deutsche Telekom to hand over all the information they had on Spitz. After several months, the German Justice accepted the demand and the company was forced to deliver a database with everything that this company had "retained" about his life. The result, added to Spitz's life in the virtual world, is a perfect map of the six-month life of the environmental activist. Perfect, yes. From August 31, 2009 to February 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom recorded and recorded your latitude and longitude more than 35 thousand times.

The first registration began on a train journey to Erlangen until the last night at his home in Berlin. In the middle, as Zeit Online said, “the digital profile allows us to know when Spitz crosses the street, how long a train takes, when he is on a plane, where he was in the cities he visited, when he worked, when he slept, when he sent a text message, which breweries he went to ”. Full life. It is clear that companies have, then, more data than governments on people. "The feeling I had when I saw all the information they had about me was terrifying," Malte Spitz tells Página / 12, who will be in Buenos Aires in June.

But much more terrifying is when you look at the map created by Lorenz Matzat, the editor of the Open Data Blog of the Zeit On Line, under the title “Tell-all telephone” (A telephone that tells everything). A click on an application that works on a worked Google map allows you to see step by step not only where Spitz was every second during those six months, but also where he was when he wrote each tweet, each message on social networks, how many text messages he sent , how many calls he made, how many he received and how long he was on the Internet, among other things.

“It is important to me to see how the system works. I was a bit skeptical about the amount of data being saved. But the data is surprising. In Germany we have 100 million telephones in a population of 80 million people. Telephone companies should think that saving so much information about users can also be a problem for them, ”says Spitz. "People are not going to believe them," he says.

The registration of the movement of mobile phones is part of the normal operation of a cellular network. Every seven seconds or so, the cell phone determines the closest tower to connect to and records the entry and exit of a call. The question is, why do telephone companies keep that information? Who has access to that data? What risk does it imply for users that a company has all this information? “A company like T-Mobile has 30 million users. They keep each record of each user and nobody knows what they do with that information, which remains in the private world ”, says Spitz. In the United States, the Electronic Frontier Foundation tried several times to access the information kept by the operators, but the "carriers" declined to provide that information.

The issue is that the States seem to have delegated the protection of private information to private companies: banks, flight companies, credit card systems ... "in all these companies, as much information is stored as possible without weighing the consequences" says Spitz. "Companies have no reason to keep this kind of information," Spitz says. The interactive map developed by Zeit On line together with the information provided by the militant is "practically perfect", according to Spitz himself. To make sense of the data provided by Deutsche Telekom, this information was crossed with Spitz's public life. The "best" thing is that the telephone company does not need to install any type of cookie or tracking system to know what a user is doing. The system does it in order to function.

The impact that the case had on the US press also has to do with the map put on its site by Zeit On line, developed by the editor Lorenz Matzat and programmed by Michael Kreil. The app makes sense of the idea of ​​a data-heavy digital journalism job: “Turn an abstract notion of something that everyone knows into something visible. Every position of yours, every connection of your phone is being registered. Every call, every text message, every data connection ”, says Matzat editor at OnlineJournalismblog.com, where he tells step by step how the application was developed, which took two weeks to program and be made available to the public.

According to Spitz, “the German court said that saving this data is unconstitutional. But at the moment there is a political debate in Germany between conservatives and social democrats about the cases of data retention ”. Meanwhile, Spitz decided to make a trip to Latin America "because there are forces that want to go in the direction of cutting off individual freedoms." The political and social activist has also been working in recent years to encourage the idea of ​​“opening governments” (open governments, in English) to improve democratic transparency by digitizing and making public all acts of government. A way, say, to return the favor.

Source: Page 12