It's like a bad Will Smith movie

posted by The Vidiot @ 1:25 PM Permalink

Everyone knows that they can track your every movement using your cell phone, right?

New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.

'Creative use' indeed. How banal they made it sound. How minuscule and harmless they make it seem.

And if that's not bad enough, a leaked report said that an ISP secretly inserted spy code into web browsers.

From late September to early October 2006, British Telecom secretly partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of the BT's customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT's network that redirected web requests through their proxy server.

Those boxes inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users. That script then reported back to Phorm the contents of the web page, which Phorm used to create ad profiles of a user. Additionally, Phorm purchased advertising space on prominent web sites, showing a default ad for a charity. But when a user who had previously looked at car sites visited one of those pages, he instead got an advertisement for car insurance.

Lovely.

Labels: surveillance