Many cell phones today come with a convenient GPS feature that allows the user to find his or her way around unfamiliar territory. What some people don’t realize, though, is that others can monitor YOUR whereabouts because of the signals your cell phone sends out.

The June 4, 2008 issue of Nature featured an article about humans and where their daily movements take them. Tracking the movements of human populations over time can be vital to understanding and preparing for concepts like controlling disease outbreaks and designing urban areas. The study’s authors followed Europeans for 6 months to collect data about where they went, what patterns emerged from their travels, etc. How did the authors track the people? By tracking their cell phones.

The cell phones of 100,000 users sent data to the an unnamed European cell carrier, which then shared the anonymized data with the study authors. Every time a call or text was made (and the cell users made millions of them), the carrier recorded the location (to within 3 km) that the user was in at the time. After six months of data, the study authors found that, by and large, humans are creatures of habit. Most people found themselves in the same places, day after day, making calls or texts from those places. It’s a fairly obvious conclusion, but the authors determined that “people devote most of their time to a few locations.” And our cell phones, as well as the ease at which we are tracked, provide the proof.

The use of cell phone data to keep tabs on the public doesn’t stop with determining call locations for the benefit of science. That technology has existed for years, albeit in a less-than-precise form. But now, a UK-based company called Path Intelligence is taking cell phone signal monitoring to a new level. A shopping center can place a Path Intelligence FootPath(tm) device on its wall and track users who are wandering the shops, even if they’re not making a call at the time (a cell phone that’s turned on will emit silent pings back to the network when it’s not in use, and those pings can be tracked). The system can monitor when people enter the shopping center, how long they stay, what stores they visit, and even what route they take through the building, all to within a few meters of distance. It can also keep track of the country in which a given phone is registered. As of May 16, 2008, two shopping centers in the UK had installed the Path Intelligence system, with three more planning to install it in the next month.

Is this a bad thing? Privacy watchdogs say it might be. Path Intelligence claims that its system can’t record information from a user’s cell phone, such as personal identity, phone numbers, account information or other sensitive material. But even supporters of the system do caution that it would be inappropriate if the system were to be linked to other systems that contain personal information. While getting a good idea about the shopping interests and habits of customers might be extremely helpful to shopping centers, intruding on personal privacy is not a responsible means to gain that information.

In addition, many people dislike the idea of being monitored in their movements. When an article about this system was posted at the Times Online, comments on the article from readers included concerns that the monitoring could extend into private homes if the homes were located close enough to the shopping centers. Questions were also raised about whether customers in the shopping centers were informed of the monitoring when they entered, or whether this monitoring was a form of forced “market research” (the article did not address this question). In short, many cell phone users might be uncomfortable with the thought that someone else is watching their movements, especially without their consent.

Path Intelligence, however, counters these concerns by saying that their FootPath(tm) technology is less invasive than closed-circuit televisions or other monitoring devices currently in place in many shops. “All we do is log the movement of a phone around an area,” they say in their website FAQ, which is less intrusive than methods that collect more personal information, such as your image. They insist that their system does not collect or keep personal information, and they say that their monitoring is similar to watching a dot move around a screen (or many dots, in the case of a shopping center). They currently encode the information that they receive in order to further protect the privacy of customers, as well.

Do you feel better, or are you feeling “watched”? One way to address this concern is simple: turn off your cell phone if you don’t want to be tracked. It makes it more difficult for people to reach you, of course, but if you don’t want the cell phone companies (or anyone else) to know your physical whereabouts, it’s the only way to be invisible. Other than total technological disconnect, there’s not much that average cell phone users can do about being tracked if the cell providers deem it worthwhile. For now, our technology, by its very nature, makes it possible for us to be a dot on a screen.  

Sources for this article: ars technica, Nature, The Times Online, Path Intelligence; Photo source: FCC