English text below!
Da es immer wieder Nachfragen gab, vor allem aus dem Ausland, wo das Thema Vorratsdatenspeicherung anscheinend weniger stark in der Debatte war, habe ich ein paar Infos noch einmal unten auf englisch zusammengeschrieben. Das Thema Vorratsdatenspeicherung wird mittlerweile auch international an Hand der Visualisierung meiner Daten breiter aufgegriffen und die Menschen machen sich Gedanken darüber, dass man den Datenschutz in diesem Bereich stärken muss und sie sehen auch die Auswirkungen der Vorratsdatenspeicherung.
Besonders die Initiative von zwei US Kongressabgeordneten freut mich. Der Demokrat Ed Markey und der Republikaner Joe Barton haben als gemeinsame Vorsitzende der parteiübergreifenden Datenschutzrunde einen Brief an die vier großen Mobilfunkanbieter der USA geschrieben. Darin fordern sie eine Offenlegung der dortigen Speicherpraxis von Verkehrsdaten. Ich hoffe das es bald erste Antworten gibt.
Die Fragen lauten:
What personally identifiable information does your company collect from your customers?
How is this information collected (i.e., initial sign-up process, usage of mobile phone, etc.)?
Other than pinpointing a customer’s location for purposes of identifying the strongest signal, does your company use any other mechanisms for determining the location of a customer’s mobile phone, such as how frequently the customer checks her email? If yes, what are these mechanisms and what is the purpose of each of them?
How does your company use customer’s personally identifiable information? Does your company rent or sell the information? Does your company use personally identifiable information for marketing purposes?
English:
Since there have been questions and some misunderstandings regarding my data retention publication, I would like to offer some background informations:
Deutsche Telekom stored this data not on their own account. They had to store this data in this extensive way, because of German and European law. The basis of this was the data retention directive by the European Union from 2006, which was implemented in German law in november 2007.
The geo-data is not from a GPS sensor in the smartphone. Instead the geo location informations are based on the informations of the cell site, so everybody was tracked down in the cell their phone was logged in and used at this moment. Therefore, these informations are stored for every mobile phone, regardless if it is a smartphone or an older mobile phone: every phone is located and the data is always stored in this way.
The amount of data is that high, over 35.000 lines, because my phone is turned on almost all the time and I’m using my mobile internet option as well as my Mail programme and services like twitter quite often. However, I don’t want to communicate less, just because my mobile provider and my government are keeping me under surveillance.
Some good news come from Washington. Two congressmen, who are Co-Chairmann of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, wrote a letter to the four mayor telecommunication companies, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile. Democrat Ed Markey and Republican Joe Barton asked them the following questions:
What personally identifiable information does your company collect from your customers?
How is this information collected (i.e., initial sign-up process, usage of mobile phone, etc.)?
Other than pinpointing a customer’s location for purposes of identifying the strongest signal, does your company use any other mechanisms for determining the location of a customer’s mobile phone, such as how frequently the customer checks her email? If yes, what are these mechanisms and what is the purpose of each of them?
How does your company use customer’s personally identifiable information? Does your company rent or sell the information? Does your company use personally identifiable information for marketing purposes?
