Haiti study: Mass mobile phone tracking can be laudable

The problem with that...

...is that in a genuine disaster, people may well be too busy to turn on the app. There also remains the problem of distributing the apps in various flavours and ensuring that enough people have it installed and running.

Simpler by far just to intercept the local towers and see who's where. And that's what the relevant authority will do every time. There also remains the problem of defining what is or is not an emergency. Phone logs, for example, came in quite handy during the recent London riots, but I'm willing to bet that not many people involved would have switched on a "Please track me" app. I like the idea of consent, but the plain truth is that it just would not work in many -or even most- circumstances.

Getting onto the wider issue; there are many scenarios where 1 dot per phone superimposed onto a map would provide very useful data...urban planning; crowd control; disaster planning/recovery etc etc. And it is going to happen, make no mistake. Is already happening, in fact. By tagging each phone individually the data becomes even more useful...if you were planning an event, for example, you could watch your tagged dots converging on your venue and you'd know in time whether or not to open up the overflow parking area and make the experience a little smoother for everyone.

The rot set in when governments legislated themselves the right to read my email, and things have been going quickly downhill since then. The best we as a populace can hope for is that 1) there's some oversight or at least a reason/warrant needed and 2) controls are put in place to stop misuse of the information.

This is a particularly pointy double-edged sword. The potential for abuse and mission creep are nearly limitless, and yet the information can be used in so many good ways too...watching realtime ebb and flow of large numbers of people would enable us to make our infrastructure more efficient.

@Graham Marsden

>>"The question you need to ask is "How anonymous will it actually be?"

Well, if the data provided is just numbers of phones turned on in a given area, it's pretty seriously anonymous, even if numbers are relatively small.

In fact, unless there was persistent anonymised identification of an individual phone and its location over time which ultimately allowed it to be linked to an individual, it's difficult to see how anonymity could suffer much.

If the information was simply 'there are X phones in this area at this time', unless X was basically 1, and the spatial/temporal resolution allowed individual phone paths to be plotted accurately enough to know which phone was which after a close encounter, which even current GPS doesn't seem likely to be good enough to do even in the open air, how could anything really be extracted from the data beyond something like "There seems to be a movement of people from area A to area B"?

If you were going to assume that data isn't going to be aggregated or anonymised at all, then you simply wouldn't be talking about the study in the report, but about quite different kinds of potential data release, which really would be a quite different issue.

If fears of a worst-case slippery-slope were are going to be the main concern every single time suggestions are made of potentially useful use of data, how many useful uses would actually happen?

In fact, if we-can't-be-too-careful-'they'-might-abuse-it logic had its way, then we probably wouldn't have an Internet for people to fret on in the first place.

>>"If you are going to an event which is "not approved by the State", would you want even "anonymous" information being collected about you?"

It's already being collected unanonymously (nonymously?) by the phone company, and no doubt many people will assume that GCHQ already has some kind of backdoor access.

If the phone company actually is currently guarding my privacy for ethica, commercial or legal reasons, why should I expect that approach to change even if they were allowed or even required to provide bulk anonymous data, when it's be pretty obvious how anonymous the data was?

If they're not currently guarding my privacy, then I wouldn't seem likely to be losing anything, whatever happened.

Personally, if I was desperately concerned, I'd just turn my phone off or leave it at home.

It's not as if I'll die if I'm disconnected from the network for a few hours.

And if I was going to an event that was likely to be frowned upon, I'd expect that there more than almost anywhere, there would likely be people around who could provide pretty similar information simply by looking, if maybe with a less accuracy, and quite possibly cameras, etc.

Whether at a demonstration or in some random normal situation, if PC Plod was reporting how many people were in their vicinity, even if they were doing it every few seconds and doing it with high accuracy, how would /that/ actually impact on someone's privacy?

If I walk down the High Street while Plod is saying "26 people, 27 people, 29 people, 27 people, .....", even if my presence actually contributes to those numbers for a while, does that actually affect my privacy even in extreme principle?

Do I really have a right to be entirely /unseen/ in public, and not simply a right not to be unnecessarily followed.