Complexity and Social Networks Blog: Mobile Phone Service Providers and Customer Location Information

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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 November 9, 2006 3:18 AM

Comments

To pick up on the example you begin with, these locational data could be (and presumably in select cases are) enormously valuable to law enforcement-- e.g., imagine if you could cross-link these data with databases of individuals convicted of particular crimes. Or if you were trying to identify material witnesses you could find out everyone who was near a particular spot at a particular time.

Posted by: David Lazer at November 9, 2006 7:21 PM

The following fits to David's comment:

In January 2005 a new toll system was introduced on the 12,000km of German Autobahn for all trucks with a maximum weight of 12tons and above. The new toll system, called LKW-MAUT, is a governmental tax for trucks based on the distance driven in kilometres and a number of other factors. The toll system managed by Toll collect ( http://www.toll-collect.de ), a joint venture of DaimlerChrysler Financial Services AG (45%), Deutsche Telekom AG (45%) and the French company, Cofiroute S.A. (10%), is not based on toll booths or plazas on the highways such as the Mass Turnpike themselves but instead works via several methods: On Board Units (OBU), manual payment terminals and via the internet. Private cars are excluded at least for the moment. However, I expect this to change at one point in the future and one day make Vickrey's "Congestion Pricing" ( http://www.vtpi.org/vickrey.htm ) possible. The system already registers any car passing one of the activated electronic "toll" bridges. In 2005 alone it stored 17 Mio. trips. Legislation only allows the data to be used for billing and requires it to be deleted after that. There are exemptions: the ministry of freight transportation can keep the licencse plate and picture data of a vehicle for three years, customs can keep them for an indefinite amount of time or at least until the toll is collected.

Since its introduction, criminal investigators and prosectuors requested movement data to be released for building stronger cases a couple ot times but were denied access. A criminal case which linked DNA data of two different killings to a truck driver stirred up political discussion about changing the "Autobahn-law" in August 2006. The German minister of the interior as well as the attorney general requested to reconsider some paragraphs for anti-terrorist and anti-crime use. Members of all political parties in return said they would not have agreed to the pass the law if it did not have such a strong data protection mechanisms built in.

Combining ones road trips with data now stored by mobile phone and credit card companies would allow for a complete movement profile of ones person. The only thing protecting us right now is the sheer size of data. The more specific the investigators question the easier to make sense of all the puzzle pieces. A general review would probably make not much sense. Is there a movement pattern for somebody suspicious? On the other hand - aren't we already agreeing to quite some transparency on buying and moving behaviour for our loyality cards? In any case, it would be quite interesting to take a look at the movement patterns of the trucks. I am sure it would make a nice scale free network map...

Posted by: Alexander Schellong at November 10, 2006 1:06 AM

I'm not sure that the size of data will deter interested parties from storing them - as in "if it can be done, it will be done". Unfortunately, the same is probably true for the usage of collected data. Not being an expert on privacy issues, I don't know how privacy can be protected here, but it sure provides a ton of opportunities for misuse!

Posted by: Maria Binz-Scharf at November 14, 2006 4:31 PM

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