The mobile phone industry sees location-based services on
cellphones as a certain money maker in the future. But the same
technology that can send a targeted advertisement to a cellphone in
the vicinity of a clothes store also lets the phone company know a
lot more about its clients.
Mobile operators already know who their customers call and how long they stay on the phone; location information lets the carriers know where a person has been and where they normally go.
Calls can also be tracked based on patterns and key words and the
operators can see all the text messages that are stored on a SIM
card even after they have been erased from the operator’s servers.
“Make no mistake about it, a lot of information is being tracked
about you, me and everybody else,” said Camille Mendler, a London-
based vice president at the telecommunications consultant Yankee
Group.
Privacy groups have long sounded a whistle of warning that mobile
phone companies store too much information about their clients.
Wang Jianzhou, the chief executive of China Mobile, the world’s
largest mobile phone company by the number subscribers, stoked those
fears last month when he told a room full of politicians and
business leaders what everybody knows, but generally do not say in a
sort of code of silence by the phone companies: “We know who you
are, but also where you are,” Wang was quoted as saying about
location-based advertising.
In doing so, he broke an unwritten rule of operators in Western
markets not to discuss openly how much information they collect.
Spokespeople for Vodafone in Britain and Telecom Italia Mobile in
Italy, for example, would say only that they abide by government
regulations that require data to be retained for a year in Britain
and five years in Italy.
“What worries me is how much data they are gathering and where
that ends up,” said Marco Calamari, an engineer and privacy advocate
who co-founded Progetto Winston Smith, an…