Mobile phones used as trackers BY MICHAEL EVANS AND NIGEL HAWKES
MOBILE PHONES can be used as tracking devices to pinpoint users within a few hundred yards, according to a report yesterday.
Sonntags Zeitung, published in Zurich, said Swiss police had been secretly tracking mobile phone users through a telephone company computer.
"Swisscom [the state-owned telephone company] has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users and can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred metres and going back at least half a year," the paper reports, adding: "When it has to, it can exactly reconstruct, down to the minute, who met whom, where and for how long for a confidential tte--tte."
Anyone who desires not to be constantly tracked should carry a one-way pager and keep your cell phone turned off. This way you can return calls when it suits you and from a location of your choosing. In some U.S. localities I understand, it it possible to rent cellphone w/o offering any form of ID, only a deposit to cover the instrument and a prepayment for the airtime This may be illegal in some EU countries. To keep someone from correlating your pager info and cellular you'd want your callers to send 'coded' info, rather than phone numbers. --Steve PGP mail preferred, see http://www.pgp.com and http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html RSA fingerprint: FE90 1A95 9DEA 8D61 812E CCA9 A44A FBA9 RSA key: http://keys.pgp.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=index&search=0x55C78B0D --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 Lammar Laboratories | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: schear@lvdi.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------