Europe on privacy: Yes for terrorists, no for citizens

So let’s see if I get this straight. Europeans shut down the U.S. SWIFT program to sift through European bank data to try to stop terror financing because it broke EU privacy rules. But when researchers at Northwestern University sought permission to track American cell phone users living in Europe, permission was granted.

Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

[…] The scientists would not say where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.

Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals’ locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week’s time period.

The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed.

[…] That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission.

I’d like to know which cell phone company was so easy with its data. Because I will be sure to never patronize that company, ever.

Privacy? What’s that?

The really sad thing is that the EU notion of privacy—or the lack thereof—is slowly but surely becoming part of the American notion of privacy as well. And it’s pretty much unavoidable. If you want to take advantage of discounted items at your local supermarket, you have to swipe a membership card, which then transfers information on every item you buy into a database. The benefit to you, supposedly, is to offer you coupons for the items you buy regularly. And yet, the majority of coupons I receive are for rival brands to the ones I buy. Funny how that works. Every time I’m told that my privacy will be protected, I discover that it isn’t.

It’s such a topsy-turvy world that I pay for privacy. There’s a monthly fee to keep my telephone number unlisted. The phone companies like to tell you that it costs them money to remove your information from the data that gets printed. That’s a load of bull. I know programming. Writing that code is a one-time programming effort. The information is in a database, and the code to say whether or not my data is retrieved is written once, and executed every time after that. It doesn’t have to be rewritten every single month. It only needs to be rewritten if I change the parameters on them and tell them I want my number published. I’m paying a fee for work that was done, what, 25 years ago? Even if you count the three times I’ve moved since then, the Y2K code rewrite, and switching to a new provider, I’m still being ripped off. My new phone provider charges two dollars less per month than Verizon. But they still charge that monthly fee.

But I digress. The authors of the study had some sleepless nights worrying about the privacy issues.

Barabasi said he spent nearly half his time on the study worrying about privacy issues. Researchers didn’t know which phone numbers were involved. They were not able to say precisely where people were, just which nearby cell phone tower was relaying the calls, which could be a matter of blocks or miles. They started with 6 million phone numbers and chose the 100,000 at random to provide “an extra layer” of anonymity for the research subjects, he said.

Barabasi said he did not check with any ethics panel. Hidalgo said they were not required to do so because the experiment involved physics, not biology.

That’s a nice little loophole to get around, but the ethics violations are still there. However, the authors of the study feel perfectly right to have invaded the privacy of 100,000 individuals—because they did it to make the world a better place.

Study co-author Hidalgo said there is a difference between being a statistic – such as how many people buy a certain brand of computer – and a specific example. The people tracked in the study are more statistics than examples.

“In the wrong hands the data could be misused,” Hidalgo said. “But in scientists’ hands you’re trying to look at broad patterns…. We’re not trying to do evil things. We’re trying to make the world a little better.”

Knowing people’s travel patterns can help design better transportation systems and give doctors guidance in fighting the spread of contagious diseases, he said.

You see? It’s for the children. So the fact that they invaded your privacy is secondary to the good that will come out of this. The end justifies the means.

I’m pretty sure someone is going to find out which cell phone company gave out that data. Will the backlash make a difference?

Here’s hoping.