Our devices leave behind a colossal footprint – the scale is breathtaking
THE Graham Dwyer appeal reminds us of the indelible trail our smartphones leave. Unless you’re a paranoid tech expert, or are willing to forego phones altogether, there is no way out.
Whether we call, text, use a map or just carry it around, the tracking qualities of our handsets are almost indefatigable. The Supreme Court has now referred to the European Court legal aspects around the mobile phone data retention issues brought up in the case. A lack of legislation makes the area less than clear.
But whatever the lawyers eventually decide in this instance, many people may not be fully aware of the effective markers we leave.
To illustrate what I mean, try this test. Assuming you own a smartphone, type in myactivity.google.com in your phone or laptop. Click or tap ‘activity controls’ and then ‘location history’. You’ll see a concentration of red dots on a map. That’s you being tracked around the country (or countries). You may have forgotten about some of them. But tap on any one of them and you may be taken aback by the detail and accuracy of your physical movement throughout the day.
At the bottom of the screen, there’s even a helpful calendar to show you exactly where you were, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Most people will never know that they are being logged in such an intimate way.
Mobile phone networks don’t capture quite as much of your actual activity (Google knows whether you were in a car, on foot or public transport), but they do need to know where your device is to work.
The basic premise is simple: if you see bars of signal reception on your phone, your phone is connecting to a physical tower or base station nearby.
Phone companies retain records of this data for a certain amount of time, although the minimum and maximum time periods partly form some of the background to the Graham Dwyer appeal.
The information they glean is largely focused on two things: your location and the number you called or texted. (They do not have the ability to look into your web activity in the way that Google and other online companies do.)
But with every year that passes, the breadth and depth of your tracked footprint keeps increasing.
We know about the big tech companies like Facebook and
Instagram tracking us so their advertisers can make judgments on what kind of people we are. What we pay less attention to are the location brokers who buy and sell huge databases of mobile phone ‘pings’ to whoever wants to buy them.
The scale of this is breathtaking. In a landmark piece of journalism two months ago, the ‘New York Times’ was able to locate, identify and track millions of individuals from their smartphone ‘pings’. Anonymity did not apply.
Unless you are one of the few to have gone through their smartphone with a fine tooth comb, switching all of your data-sharing options off, you’re on a map. That applies literally.
Many people are not aware of the effective markers we leave