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This a fascinating article. A German politician decides to understand how your cell phone company can track you down:

[[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/media/26privacy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss|
It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know]]

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
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Michael Löwa for The New York Times

Malte Spitz was surprised by how much detail Deutsche Telekom had about his whereabouts.
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But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with Zeit Online, a sister publication of a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.

Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.

For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.

And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”

While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.

“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 26, 2011

Esta es la respuesta del presidente de la comisión interactiva de publicidad en torno al debate que se ha forma en torno a la nueva legislación en temas de privacidad en el congreso de los Estados Unidos. Básicamente expone lo que realmente está pasando en este momento y es la falta de claridad general en cuanto a terminologia a la fijación de estandares en cuanto a temas de privacidad se refiere.

Internet Privacy LegislationPublished: March 21, 2011To the Editor:
Re “A New Internet Privacy Law?” (editorial, March 19):
No one opposes strong consumer privacy protections, least of all digital media businesses that depend on consumer trust and safety for their livelihood. Indeed, the principles laid out by Senator John Kerry are those that the industry adopted in July 2009, embedded in a self-regulatory mechanism launched by the Council of Better Business Bureaus in January, and voted unanimously into a membership code of conduct by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in February.
Yet you want to go further, into areas that are wholly uncharted. You want legislation to require Web browsers to include a universal do-not-track option, when even the Federal Trade Commission concedes that it has no adequate definition of data tracking, collection or first-party marketing.
You want enforcement of “clear standards,” when there are no standards in custom, let alone law, to determine whether, for example, cookies used to limit spam in consumers’ browsers should be deemed “their information” and subject to government control.
The Digital Advertising Alliance, representing more than 5,000 companies in six major trade associations, has enabled a safe, sane and simple self-regulatory system for assuring consumers transparency, notice, choice and control of their data. You are premature in calling for legislation when no need exists.
 Randall Rothenberg
President and Chief Executive
Interactive Advertising Bureau
New York, March 19, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/l22internet.html

En estos momentos los asuntos de Privacidad están pasando por un momento crucial de definición alrededor del Mundo a nivel de legislación. La Union Europea acaba de anunciar que actuará en contra de cualquier compañia que interactue con ciudadanos de la comunidad sin importar que la compañia tenga como base un pais que no sea comunitario.
En Estados Unidos en estos momentos Obama y está apoyando la nueva legislación con medidas mucho más fuertes que protejan la privacidad. Aquí voy a poner unos enlaces en inglés para seguir estos últimos acontecimientos.

Pr-Usa

The right to be forgotten.

Stopped in their tracks. The Economist.

EU Commission Puts Forward ‘Privacy By Default’ Rules

Colombia conectividad – Articulo Espectador.

Colombia, noveno en conectividad Por: Redacción Negocios Aunque ha aumentado el número de usuarios con acceso a internet, son pocas las personas que se atreven a realizar compras vía web. Enlaces patrocinados – PauteFacil.com

Un análisis realizado por la multinacional Nokia Siemens en 50 países, entre economías desarrolladas y emergentes, se dio a la tarea de medir la infraestructura en conectividad y el uso útil de la tecnología a partir de tres escenarios: consumidores, gobierno y negocios.

Entre los países latinoamericanos, Colombia está entre los de mejor conectividad y ocupa un quinto lugar después de Chile, Argentina, Brasil y México. Cuando se analiza su posición en el escalafón mundial se mantiene en el noveno puesto por detrás de naciones como Malasia, Suráfrica, Chile, Rusia, y Turquía.

El estudio recomienda al país “lograr un entorno socioeconómico más estable para desarrollar progresos en infraestructura de las Tecnologías de la Comunicación y la Información, lo que representa una oportunidad de negocio para que Colombia alcance los estándares de conectividad que tienen las demás economías latinoamericanas”.

En los tres contextos en los que es aplicado el estudio, Colombia obtuvo el puntaje más alto en ‘Consumidores’, pues son cada vez más los usuarios que tienen acceso a internet, así lo ratifican las cifras más recientes del Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones, “El total de suscriptores fijos y móviles del servicio de acceso a internet aumentó 4,03% en el primer trimestre de 2010, llegando a 3.309.530. Los accesos dedicados fijos aumentaron un 4,25%, mientras que los accesos móviles por suscripción se incrementaron en 5,4%”.

A pesar de estos números, para el experto en telecomunicaciones Juan Carlos Gómez, el país tiene un largo camino por recorrer en este campo. “Son estadísticas bastantes bajas respecto a los 45 millones de colombianos y esto se debe en gran medida al costo que en la actualidad tienen los terminales”.

El país, conforme al estudio, es un modelo a seguir en el campo del gobierno en línea (e-government), pues está a disposición de la ciudadanía una plataforma en la que se pueden diligenciar trámites y solucionar dudas en lo relacionado con el andamiaje del Estado. Sin embargo, “los ciudadanos carecen de entrenamiento, por lo tanto no hacen el uso deseado de las herramientas”, señala el análisis.

En cuanto a la plataforma de negocios, el estudio indica que “Colombia ofrece un desempeño débil en la infraestructura de negocios y, en consecuencia, en el uso de habilidades. Ello se debe a las bajas inversiones en hardware y software de las empresas colombianas”.

Según Gómez, la problemática se centra en que no hay una cultura del comercio electrónico (e-commerce) pues “la gente desconfía de efectuar compras o ventas por internet ya que piensan que no hay seguridad en las transacciones. Por otro lado, para hacer negocios por internet se requiere de una cuenta bancaria y de una tarjeta de crédito, y aquí existe todavía un bajo nivel de bancarización”.

Agregó que el gobierno “va por buen camino” al volcar el subsidio de telefonía de voz fija a conexión de internet, que beneficia a los estratos uno, dos y tres. Además afirmó que es necesario que las empresas y universidades tengan dispuestas más aplicaciones para su personal.

According to Cuba’s government officials they are not afraid of letting people accessing internet freely:
Según el gobiero cubano, ellos no tienen ningún problema en dejar acceso libre al Internet:

The economist

Facebook y Twitter no se unieron al pacto de la “Global Network Initiative” Para empezar a buscar acuerdos en torno a la privacidad en Internet. Sin las dos redes sociales más importantes en la red, este acuerdo, que fue firmado por Google y Microsorft, queda muy débil.

http://www.enter.co/internet/twitter-y-facebook-ignoran-pacto-por-la-libertad-de-expresion/

Germany has finally gotten the data that Google “by mistake” has collected from open wifi signals from many of its citizens. Public officials say that now they have to develop their own piece of software in order to be able to interpret this huge amount of data. My question here is what kind of interpretation will they give to it? What kind of perspective are they taking to read this data?