Skip to main content

Wireless companies ‘track your every move’

big-brother-at&t-tracking-gpsBig Brother really is watching you — constantly. According to a new report by The New York Times, cell phone companies often “track your every move” — and they do so while keeping their customers entirely in the dark about the intrusive practice.

This disconcerting revelation came to light after German politician Malte Spitz sued his mobile provider, Deutsche Telekom, to find out exactly what information about him they had acquired. What the court revealed is shocking — even if it’s not much of a surprise to those suspicious of our ceaseless connectivity.

Recommended Videos

Between the end of August, 2009 to the end of February, 2010, Deutsche Telekom, current owner of T-Mobile, “had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times,” The New York Times reports. Privacy experts say the information divulged as a result of the lawsuit provides an unprecedented look into the invasive workings of the world’s telecoms.

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” Sarah E. Williams, a graphic information expert at Columbia University tells the Times. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

In the United States, even less is known about what level of surveillance wireless companies are conducting on their customers because these companies are not required to divulge what information they collect. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, that information is extensive, and is only getting more so.

One of the reasons telecoms are collecting the data is for market research purposes. Another, perhaps more troubling reason, is for the benefit of law enforcement, like the FBI and CIA.

In contrast to the installation of “cookies” by websites, which are used to gather information about a person’s online browsing habits, it is currently impossible — or at least incredibly difficult — to opt out of cell phone surveillance in the US. A variety of “do not track” services, from companies like Google and Mozilla, are now available, which prevent websites from automatically installing cookies on users’ computers.

Perhaps that will change if customers start suing their telecoms, as Mr. Spitz did in Germany. But in this age when many of us have already opted out of personal privacy by publishing a wide range of aspects of our lives online, such a fight seems unlikely.

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
Samsung might return to all-Exynos for its Galaxy S26 lineup
A close up of the triple camera on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus

Samsung has seen a smoother development with its Exynos 2600 chip than it did with the 2500, according to a new report. Prior to the release of the Samsung Galaxy S25, rumors suggested the phone could use the Exynos 2500 or the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and leaks provided a lot of conflicting information. Now, a report from a Korean news outlet says the company has already achieved a 30% yield from its manufacturing process.

The company is using a 2 nanometer production process, and it's initial yields were higher than expected according to The Bell. Samsung plans to start mass production of this chip in the second half of the year and say it could improve performance by 12% and power efficiency by 25%.

Read more
Google Messages might let you unsend awkward messages in RCS chats
The Google Messages app on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Google Messages, the default messaging app on Android phones, could soon get new features that will let you unsend texts like third-party messengers. The unsend functionality is reportedly under testing and will be available for chats over RCS protocol, which succeeds traditional SMS with improved support for multimedia, emoji, reactions, etc.

Presently, when you delete a message, it is only removed from your device without impacting other participants in the chat. Now, Google appears to be testing a new "delete for everyone" functionality for conversations that will delete messages for all parties, similar to instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. 9to5Google spotted references to the under-development functionality, suggesting it might be available for a wider audience to benefit from -- though the exact timeline of remains unknown.

Read more
Another AI assistant for iPhone? This one’s different
Le Chat on iPhone.

Did we really need another AI assistant on the iPhone? Perhaps not, but a new one has arrived. Le Chat, developed by Mistral, is a French-based AI assistant that was previously only available online. It has now been launched on the App Store and Google Play Store.

Once called Europe’s great hope for AI, Le Chat uses Mistral’s native language models, such as Mistral Large and Pixtral Large. Thus, the app competes with other AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Read more