Secretly Tracking You and Me
Monday, May 5th, 2008
The first study to track the habits of people through their cellular phone units has been released and the outcome has resulted in many surprising results. First, the study showed that many people rarely go outside a 20 mile radius of their residence as for city dwellers. The study took more than a half month and was aimed to study the habits of people to better understand their everyday lives. This is forst of all illegal in the US and the researchers say the study was done outside the US but in an industrialized nation.
This study rasies questions in the area of privacy where such devices we carry and become intimate parts of our daily lives being used as tools against us. With the advent of more GPS enabled phones, tacking is easier for these GPS units have coordinates included in the information they send to the base server as they travel from area to area. Cellular tracking in the study had the unknown users tracked through the cellular towers which had enough information to triangulate exact locations. This is another danger for us cellular phone users who are at risk of being spied upon without us even knowing about it.