Location Tracking Via Cell Phones

There is a nice article in the NY Times on how cell phone records provide extremely detailed records of spatial location.

The key thing here is that this information is constantly collected. In order for a cell phone to work properly it needs to know which cell tower is closest and will provide the strongest signal.

This does not require that the user do anything (accept a cookie, turn on GPS tracking, etc.) but have a phone with them.

This is something that we've known for a long time but this is a nice and easily accessible article (i.e., great for teaching) on the topic.



The newspaper Die Zeit made a great visualization of the location information for Mark Spitz (a Green Party politician). Well worth checking out. It is in German. Here's the same page embedded in Google Translate from German to English.