Clark Boyd

Clark Boyd

Clark Boyd is a reporter for The World. From advances in technology to the ups and downs of the markets, he has reported from many different countries for the show. He is now based out of the Boston newsroom.

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Tech Podcast: A German and his cellphone…tracked

April 1, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment
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This is Malte Spitz, German Green Party politician and cell phone user. Super user, actually. Recently, he started wondering just how much data his cell phone company had on him. So, he asked for it. And under German Constitutional Law, the company had to fork it over. Spitz then took the data, all six months of it, and it available to the German newspaper “Die Zeit,” which took it and made an intriguing, some might say frightening, visualization of it. Not hard, considering Spitz cell phone was registered and logged by a local cell phone tower no fewer than 35,000 times in that six month period. In this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast, we’ll feature an interview with Spitz, and find out why he asked for his information, and what he intends to do now. You can read, and hear, a longer interview with Malte Spitz over at Deutsche Welle‘s Spectrum program.

Also on this program, we’ll do a survey of how countries that currently use nuclear power, and those that had plans to, are feeling in the wake of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan. It all raises the question of risk assessment, not just with nuclear power, but with all the things that we might have cause to fear in our lives. To give us some perspective, we’ve got an interview with Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Haven’t you always wanted to take a peak inside Virgin Galactic’s commercial spacecraft? I know I do. Luckily, the BBC was granted access to get inside the craft, and we’ll have the report. If you’ve got $200,000 to spare, it just might be a sweet, if short, ride.

And here’s a question: how would you like to help the FBI solve a cold case? Well, you might have to know a bit about cryptography, or not. No one’s really sure if the scraps of paper left behind at a 1999 crime scene are encrypted clues, or just gibberish. So, they’ve made the notes available online, and are asking for the public’s help.

Finally, we pay tribute to a giant of stickiness, Harry Coover. Coover worked with cyanoacrylates, and that work eventually gave rise to the product we all know and love (and hate), Super Glue. Coover passed away this week at the age of 94. He had more than 400 patents, and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2010.

Remember, you can always join the fun on our Facebook fan page, or follow us on Twitter.

(Photo: German Green Party)

Discussion

2 comments for “Tech Podcast: A German and his cellphone…tracked”

  • http://profiles.google.com/jrandomwinner David Lewis

    If you actually believe there is nowhere to put nuclear waste, even in the US there is the facility that is licensed for the military, i.e. the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They found a salt formation that has been stable for hundreds of millions of years. The fact that it is a salt formation means water has not been flowing through it carrying anything anywhere. There is enough space to bury all the world’s waste. And, the planet cannot identify the difference between military and civilian nuclear waste. But the drumbeat goes on – what about the waste, there’s still no place to put it. It is a political football. This is not a technical or scientific issue.

    I’ve just read “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus” by Kagan et.al. which a lot of climate activists are touting as helpful to explain why although the relevant scientists are very unified that climate change is a significant problem that must be dealt with the public, especially in the US is deeply divided. What the climate activists, most of whom deny that nuclear power is the solution or could even be a part of a solution, anyway what these types miss is that the authors of that study chose several issues to highlight what they’ve discovered. Nuclear waste was taken to illustrate an issue there is agreement among the relevant scientific community that it has a solution that nevertheless the public is greatly concerned that there isn’t. Just like climate change, only its a different set of actors. The types who tell us to listen to the scientists when it comes to climate tell us to ignore the scientists or pay attention to a fringe group when it comes to nuclear matters, especially nuke waste.

    By the time we straighten this all out the planet will be dead. But on the off chance it might not be, why don’t you stop allowing people to tell other people there is no place to put nuclear waste on your show without mentioning that by the way, there is.

  • http://profiles.google.com/jeff.clough Jeff Clough

    There’s a cell phone tracking issue that I think hasn’t been scrutinized deeply enough. It’s one thing to track my location and keep the data around for 6 months, and I don’t really care about that in and of itself. The same people who have access to my cell phone location records also have access to my credit card data. They know where I live, work, and shop. Big deal. What *is* interesting to me is that they can tell who I hang out with. Even if my little group never called, emailed, or messaged each other, our association would still be obvious from our correlated locations. I wasn’t around to experience McCarthyism, but I see that history shows that stressful times have a way of fostering, under the right circumstances, paranoia about friends and neighbors and co-workers. The next time society goes this way, determining people’s associations will be a simple matter of data analysis rather than detective work.

    One hallmark of western civilization, and America in particular, is freedom of association. In support of this, I’d like to see all records of location and communication held by our communication providers limited to two billing cycles, after which, and including backups, it is erased. Access to even the current records must also require a search warent that meets 4th amendment standards. This isn’t a technical problem, and it’s only a small business problem, but it yields a huge (to me) political benefit by keeping the cost of data gathering high.

    I like the idea of living in an everyone-knows-everything world, but despite recent *talk* about transparency in government, the trend I see is that the governed are more transparent, and the government is less so.