Jose

Surveillance of the networked society: Is your data really private?

Hypothesis 3

Background 3

Who has access to the data 3

How is the data obtained 5

Privacy Policy? Is it really private? 8

Advantages 9

Marketing/Retailing 9

Banking/Crediting 9

Law enforcement 9

Researchers 9

Disadvantages 10

Privacy Issues 10

Security issues 10

Misuse of information/inaccurate information 10

Impacts on Business/Markets 10

Conclusion 10

References 12

Hypothesis

With mobile social networking on the rise, the trend of new and innovative cell phones has been on the horizon for a while now, but none have considered the fact you’re cell phone may be spying on you. With the amount of bells and whistles constantly growing in order to top the last, are the new features really your friend? One thing for sure is if the companies start data mining the information received back from the service providers, can be used to find out routines of peoples daily activities. Essentially, it’s another step towards creating a surveillance of the networked society.

Background

As seen with calls monitoring done by the government, having the intelligence community monitoring phone calls is very disturbing and a direct violation of the constitution. What is even more shocking is who is doing the monitoring. It's not just the NSA, NRO, DIA etc... Look who is working for these government agencies. There has been a lot of outsourcing of intelligence jobs. For example, looking at the web page for SAIC the job posting require SAP clearance and are contracted to the NSA, DIA, etc.. Overall, it comes down to the fact the “our” government has outsourced Intel gathering to corporate America. Also they say their only looking at call patterns. Finally, with the high level use of the statistical analysis and parts of conversations, they call tell more than just the call patterns. The fundamental principle of the networked society is information sharing and processing (Kling and Allen, 1996). Advances in computing technology, that represents the infrastructure of the networked society, make possible to collect, store, analyze and retrieve personal information created in the very process of participation.

“More information has been produced and stored in the past five years, than at any time in human history. E-mails, text messages, mobile phone calls, TV, websites. We are drowning in the stuff. But how much of it has added to the sum of human knowledge? And has anyone thought what it is doing to our brains? … вЂ?I think you are going to see more rapid production of further information,’ says Keith Kendrick, head of neuroscience at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge.” So noted the BBC in 2003.

Who has access to the data

The state of Missouri has begun a program to track individual movements on highways through cell phones. The Missouri Department of Transportation will spend $3 million annually on a program to monitor the movements of individuals on highways via their cell phones without their knowledge or consent.

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology. A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road.

AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia. "The traffic community has been really excited for quite some time about the possibility of being able to use cell phones to track vehicles," Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials told the Associated Press. "Almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system."

The United Arab Emirates government will monitor, track, tax and ticket every driver with a mandatory black box. Officials are ready to roll out a black box spy system that allows satellites to track each and every driver in the UAE and automatically issue speeding and other tickets for the slightest transgression. The first 10,000 black boxes will be installed in Abu Dhabi and Dubai with 700,000 installed by 2009. IBM signed a $125 million contract for the system last April. The GPS-enabled "Smart Box" will also be used to tax drivers for every mile driven and will be rolled out as car registrations are renewed. The device provides a voice warning if the driver exceeds the local speed limit for wherever he may be driving. If the voice warning is ignored, the system would use a GSM/GPRS link to beam the car's speed, identity and location to the police so that a ticket can be issued. The system would also track and monitor any other driving violations, including "reckless behavior."

How is the data obtained

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

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