locating via GSM, revisited (legal sidenote)

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at openmoko.com
Wed Apr 23 04:52:03 CEST 2008


ha ha. Very funny.
The government uses location information all the time to track people  
when they become 'targets' of 'investigations', and then they use  
their court system to make the same illegal to an individual.
At least that tells us that they understood how useful this  
information is.
Wolfgang

On Apr 22, 2008, at 4:39 PM, Harald Welte wrote:

> Just as a general note added to the discussion:
>
> As far as I remember, there has been a highest federal court ruling in
> Austria some time ago, stating that the location information though
> present for anyone to read in the intrinsics of the GSM signal, cannot
> be used without explicit permission by the network operator.
>
> The point they made was that the subscription contract between the
> operator and the customer covers things like voice calls, data calls,
> GPRS data, etc - but it does not permit the use of GSM signals for
> locating the handset on the customer side.
>
> I don't say I like this, and I also don't say OM should not  
> investigate
> thsi further.  I'm just stating that there are legal issues and  
> somebody
> inside FIC legal should probably do an extensive survey of the legal
> situation all over the target market to make sure OM doesn't get into
> trouble here.
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> - Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
> = 
> = 
> = 
> = 
> = 
> = 
> ======================================================================
> Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone
>





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