Die Zeit Uses Six Months of Mobile Data to Profile Green Politician

F-Secure:

Have you ever wondered just how much your phone reveals about you?

That’s what Green party politician Malte Spitz wanted to discover…



A 2008 German law required all telecommunications providers with more than 10,000 customers to retain six months worth of data on all calls, messages and connections. Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 2010.



Spitz acquired (meta)data from his telecom provider covering a period from August 2009 to February 2010. Zeit Online has made the raw data available via Google Docs. To demonstrate just how much of a personal profile can be crafted, Zeit Online augmented the data with publicly available information such as Spitz’s tweets and blog entries.