Malte Spitz: Your phone company is watching

141,556 views ・ 2012-07-24

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha
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Hi. This is my mobile phone.
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A mobile phone can change your life,
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and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom.
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With a mobile phone,
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you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria.
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With a mobile phone,
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you can tweet a message
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and start a protest in Egypt.
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And with a mobile phone,
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you can record a song, load it up to
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SoundCloud and become famous.
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All this is possible with your mobile phone.
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I'm a child of 1984,
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and I live in the city of Berlin.
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Let's go back to that time, to this city.
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Here you can see
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how hundreds of thousands of people
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stood up and protested for change.
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This is autumn 1989,
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and imagine that all those people standing up
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and protesting for change had a
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mobile phone in their pocket.
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Who in the room has a mobile phone with you?
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Hold it up.
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Hold your phones up, hold your phones up!
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Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow.
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That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.
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But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone,
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and how it changed my life.
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And I will talk about this.
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These are 35,830 lines of information.
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Raw data.
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And why are these informations there?
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Because in the summer of 2006,
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the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.
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This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive.
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This directive says that each phone company in Europe,
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each Internet service company all over Europe,
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has to store a wide range of information about the users.
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Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?
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Who sends whom a text message?
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And if you use your mobile phone, where you are.
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All this information is stored for at least six months,
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up to two years by your phone company
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or your Internet service provider.
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And all over Europe, people stood up and said,
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"We don't want this."
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They said, we don't want this data retention.
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We want self-determination in the digital age,
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and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies
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have to store all this information about us.
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They were lawyers, journalists, priests,
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they all said: "We don't want this."
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And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people
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went out on the streets of Berlin and said,
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"Freedom, not fear."
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And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0.
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Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.
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And I also ask myself, does it really work?
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Can they really store all this information about us?
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Every time I use my mobile phone?
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So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom,
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which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany,
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and I asked them, please,
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send me all the information you have stored about me.
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And I asked them once, and I asked them again,
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and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.
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But then I said, I want to have this information,
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because this is my life you are protocoling.
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So I decided to start a lawsuit against them,
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because I wanted to have this information.
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But Deutsche Telekom said, no,
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we will not give you this information.
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So at the end, I had a settlement with them.
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I'll put down the lawsuit
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and they will send me all the information I ask for.
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Because in the mean time,
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the German Constitutional Court ruled
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that the implementation of this E.U. directive
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into German law was unconstitutional.
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So I got this ugly brown envelope
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with a C.D. inside.
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And on the C.D., this was on.
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Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information.
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At first I saw it, and I said, okay,
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it's a huge file. Okay.
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But then after a while I realized,
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this is my life.
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This is six months of my life,
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into this file.
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So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it?
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Because you can see where I am,
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where I sleep at night,
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what I am doing.
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But then I said, I want to go out with this information.
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I want to make them public.
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Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.
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So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this.
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This is a visualization of six months of my life.
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You can zoom in and zoom out,
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you can wind back and fast forward.
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You can see every step I take.
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And you can even see
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how I go from Frankfurt by train
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to Cologne, and how often I call in between.
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All this is possible with this information.
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That's a little bit scary.
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But it is not only about me.
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It's about all of us.
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First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me,
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and we talk to each other a couple of times.
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And then there are some friends calling me,
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and they call each other.
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And after a while you are calling you,
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and you are calling you, and you have this great
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communication network.
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But you can see how your people are communicating with each other,
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what times they call each other, when they go to bed.
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You can see all of this.
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You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group.
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If you have access to this information,
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you can see what your society is doing.
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If you have access to this information,
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you can control your society.
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This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.
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This is a blueprint how to survey your society,
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because you know who talks to whom,
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who sends whom an email, all this is possible
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if you have access to this information.
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And this information is stored for at least six months
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in Europe, up to two years.
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Like I said at the beginning,
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imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin
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in autumn of 1989
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had a mobile phone in their pocket.
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And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest,
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and if the Stasi would have known
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who are the leaders behind it,
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this may never have happened.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there.
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And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain.
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Because today, state agencies and companies
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want to store as much information as they can get about us,
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online and offline.
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They want to have the possibility to track our lives,
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and they want to store them for all time.
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But self-determination and living in the digital age
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is no contradiction.
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But you have to fight for your self-determination today.
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You have to fight for it every day.
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So, when you go home,
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tell your friends
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that privacy is a value of the 21st century,
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and it's not outdated.
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When you go home, tell your representative
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only because companies and state agencies have the possibility
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to store certain information, they don't have to do it.
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And if you don't believe me,
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ask your phone company what information they store about you.
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So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone,
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let it be a reminder to you
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that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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