I read this article in the New York Times

Briefly, a German Green Party politican requested from his mobile phone company any records that they have relating to his mobile phone's geolocation. They were very reluctant to divulge that info and he took his case to Germany's Supreme Court and finally forced his phone compnay to hand over the data.

The data is a record of the time and date of any SMS/GPRS activity to or from his phone together with the location of the base station through which each of the transactions was routed. Also included in each record is the direction (I think) of the phone from the base station.

My thoughts. It must be possible, at least in principle, to record information relating to the frequent (every few seconds) "pings" each mobile phone sends out in order to locate its most viable base station. Geolocation data could be collected without even the mobile phone accessing any GPRS or SMS service.

If you follow the links on the NY Times page you can end up on the German Politician's site and download the data.

(It's here if you cannot find it).

There's an interesting graphical representation of the data here

Of course, collecting this information is not, in itself, wrong. What is wrong is that so few people are aware that it is being collected. If we don't know that it is both happening and has tremendous potential in assisting those intent on demolishing our privacy, then we are unlikely to demand that safeguards are put on the information's access and use.

There must already be masses of geolocation info collected about us coming from credit cards, car license plate recognition, etc... altogether it could provide a very powerful picture to those marketing products and services.

My information (I hope) is not for sale...!