From San Jose Mercury news
Technology that tracks cell phones draws fire
Cellular telephones, long associated with untethered freedom, are becoming silent leashes, as cellular telephone companies around the world have begun installing equipment that will allow them -- or police, ambulance dispatchers, worried parents or jealous spouses -- to precisely track the location of callers.
In many cases, the new technology is being defended as public safety insurance for people making 911 or other emergency calls. But the ability this technology offers for law enforcement officials or just plain snoops to continuously monitor a caller's position and movement in detail -- even months after the call was made -- is drawing fire from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
"The question is whether the telephone system is being built for communication or surveillance,'' said David Banisar, a staff attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group.
At the moment, it appears to be evolving into a tool for both purposes. The most public use of cellular positioning information was unveiled this month by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone: a system that
reports the position of a mobile phone by faxing a map of its location
to the person requesting the information.
The company said that the new service was intended primarily for parents checking on their children. To protect the privacy of callers,the person asking for the location of a cell phone must know the caller's personal identification number, or PIN.
But not all uses of cellular tracking technology are considered so
benign. In December, the Sonntags Zeitung newspaper reported that Swiss police could recover a mobile telephone user's position for
any call made in the previous six months.
Renata Cosby, a spokeswoman for Swisscom, the nation's dominant phone company, said last week that the company releases position information only on a judge's order. Switzerland,like most European nations and unlike the United States, has privacy laws prohibiting collection of personal data without a specific business purpose.
Elsewhere, police have already found such information useful. A London prosecutor, Victor Temple, said that he had used data from cell phone records to convict a drug dealer of murder last year. The records showed calls converging at the scene of the murder, which helped to persuade a jury that the man's alibi was false.
In the United States, those who favor installing even more advanced
position-sensing equipment in cellular phone systems generally cite
911 emergency services as justification. By April of this year, the
Federal Communications Commission will require cell phone companies to include rough position information when passing along a 911 call, and within three and a half years, they must be able to identify the caller's location to within 125 meters.
The rough position information required by the first phase is simply
the location of the cellular antenna that is processing the call. In
rural parts of the country, a single antenna can serve an area, or
cell, with a 25-mile radius. But in cities they serve cells a few blocks in diameter.
But the second phase, which will begin in October 2001, will require
special equipment. The industry is experimenting with two basic technologies that have very different implications for privacy: an
''infrastructure'' solution in which position-sensing equipment would
be installed on each antenna tower, and a ''handset'' solution that
would incorporate global position sensing technology in each cellular
telephone.
Privacy advocates prefer the handset solution because it would allow
the caller to control when his or her position was given out. They
also point out that this system would display the coordinates of the
phone's location to the person carrying it. A cell phone user could
call a friend after running out of gas and tell the would-be rescuer
where to find the car by reading its position off the phone's screen.
Any system built into the tower's electronics, on the other hand,
would be able to monitor the precise location of a cell phone whenever it was turned on. This information could be archived or used to build sophisticated customer profiles.
But the FCC is subtly, if inadvertently, discouraging phone companies from adopting the handset technology by requiring them to be able to find the position of two-thirds of all cellular calls,including calls made with old handsets. Global position sensing would be available only with new phones.
What bothers privacy advocates in the United States is that law enforcement agencies are lobbying for cellular tracking data. The
FBI is pushing for access to position information when it has a
warrant to tap a cellular phone. That has prompted sometimes
contentious negotiations between the cellular industry and the FBI.
The cellular industry sees the new requirements as an opportunity. It
is lobbying all 50 states for subsidies for the new equipment. Many
states levy special taxes to finance land-line 911 services; cellular
companies want the same incentives.
The industry is exploring income opportunities of its own. Tim
Wuerger, the product manager for Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure
Group, said that the company had trademarked the term''Neighborhood Cordless'' and planned to help cell phone companies compete with regional phone companies by cutting rates when people used the phones in or near their homes.
''You could have a five-mile zone around your house,'' he said. ''Within that zone, you would get wired-line rates.''
Motorola is also exploring other ways to route a call to the closest
branch of a chain. For example, he said, the cell phone company
might give the number 1-800-PIZZAME to pizza delivery services and
sell sections of a city to different companies; each would answer
only calls in its neighborhood.
Positioning information could also be sold to businesses like
delivery companies that want to find the closest truck to pick up a
package, Wuerger said.
For the most part, proponents play up the safety benefits of the
cellular emergency call design, known as E911.
Dan Phythyon, chief of the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, said: ''We approached E911 service by concentrating on safety, an issue that consumer surveys confirm is one of the main reasons why people buy mobile phones. E911 will improve their safety by making it easier for public safety personnel to locate people in need of emergency assistance.''
Even so, Phythyon said, ''there also could be privacy concerns that emerge, which the FCC may need to address.'' But because the two basic technologies have different potentials for abuse, some privacy advocates say that it may be dangerous to wait until the technical standards are set to address privacy concerns.
Others argue that the battle should shift to legal standards because
limits will be required with whichever technology is adopted. ''The
companies are always going to think up new and better products that use location information,'' said James Dempsey, the senior staff
counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil
liberties group. ''We should concentrate on the legal standard for
government access.
''Law enforcement is right that this technology may help track kidnappers,'' he said. ''But it's also going to help the kidnappers stalk their victims.'' |
