



This activity is monitored and logged by your mobile phone provider, allowing them to identify where you are and where you've been. To send and receive calls and messages, your phone must constantly communicate with mobile phone towers. For one, it can be sold by companies to make money it can also can be used to predict where you'll be at a given point in the future it can be used by governments.

This kind of detailed picture can be valuable to all kinds of people and organisations. Or, to take another example, if you are a government employee and are in the same cafe as a specific journalist, you could be be flagged as a leaker. If you and another person, or other people, are in the same place at specific times of the day, it's possible to infer what relationships you have with these people - if, for example, they are co-workers, lovers, roommates, or family members. Location data can also be used to map out your relationships with others. His daily routine was crystal clear, as were any deviations from this routine. The records included logs of calls and texts as well as location, which Zeit used to create a detailed visualisation about his life. In Germany, newspaper Die Zeit did a similar thing with the phone records of Green Party politician Malte Spitz, which Spitz got out of his mobile phone provider. Based on 6 months of communications records for Balthasar Glättli, a member of Switzerland's Green Party, the visualisation gives a remarkable amount of insight into Glättli's life. Location information can reveal not just where you live and work, but also your visits to churches, clinics, bars, friends and lovers it can show which protests you've participated in, or which political organisations or support groups you're part of.Ī map-based visualisation made recently by Open Data City and others shows how this works. Add publicly-available addresses, tweets, photos, and/or your phone records, and the story gets really detailed. Location information collected over time can tell a surprisingly full story about who you are and what your life looks like. Your mobile phone in particular is a very effective tracking device: Where you go, it goes, and it records your location all the time - even when you're not connected to the internet. Your devices - computers, mobile phones, and tablets - are constantly telling others where you are.
