Complexity and Social Networks Blog

« November 6, 2006 | Main | December 4, 2006 »

9 November 2006

Mobile Phone Service Providers and Customer Location Information

I recently finished serving as an expert witness in a court case in which I had to provide my opinion about the possible locations of a mobile phone given cellular tower IDs and base station positions. While this information had to be subpoenaed from Verizon as part of the litigation, it may be disconcerting for some to acknowledge that in databases distributed throughout the world, mobile phone service providers are storing records of location and social network data for one out of three people on Earth.

Besides the data’s obvious utility in courtroom trial cases like the one I was testifying in, I’m curious about the long-term consequences of commercial companies recording a time series of locations and communication events for billions of people. Who legally owns this data? Because carriers like T-Mobile & Sprint now publicly disclose the locations of their towers, base station locations are no longer the corporate secret they once were, and subsequently can’t be used to prevent customers from obtaining the location information collected about them. If I ask my T-Mobile representative to provide me with my call log history, they don’t seem to have a problem with disclosing my communication events to me. However, when asked to provide me with an approximation of the locations associated with each of my calls, they still claim this is prohibited. So, empirically at least, it doesn’t appear that the customers own the location data collected about them. And if the customers don’t own this information, then I imagine by default, the mobile operators are the ones who own the records of movement data for all of their customers.

What guidelines do mobile operators have to abide by when using this data? Can it be sold to a 3rd party? How much would a detailed time-series of my locations over the last five years go for on Ebay? Who would be the highest bidder? Urban planning consultants interested in public transportation usage? Companies working on developing the next census? Wall St traders interested in where I’m doing my grocery shopping?

This data clearly has value. Already carriers are selling real-time location information to companies who use this information to extrapolate the location and speed of the individual and use this data to offer road traffic updates and forecasts. As the major carriers’ billion dollar networks turn into a commodity infrastructure, mobile operators are going to be ever more interested in monetizing the location data generated from their customers. (“This speeding ticket has been brought to you courtesy of Cingular Wireless. Raising the bar.”)

So here is an exercise for the interested reader – call up your own service provider and ask for the location information associated with your call logs. Let me know if you’ve had any luck.

Posted by Nathan Eagle at 3:18 AM