Your phone company is watching - Malte Spitz

Hi, this is my mobile phone. A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud, and become famous. All this is possible with your mobile phone.

I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. Let's go back to that time, to this city. Here, you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. This is autumn 1989, and you imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? Hold it up! Hold your phones up! All your phones up! Hold it up! An Android? Blackberry? Wow, that's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.

But today, I will talk about mine—my mobile phone and how it changed my life. I will talk about this. These are thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information, raw data. And why are these information there? Because in the summer of 2006, the EU Commission tabled a directive. This directive is called the data retention directive. This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about their users: who called whom, who sent him an email, who sent him a text message, and if you used your mobile phone, where you were.

All these information are stored for at least six months, up to two years, by your phone company or your internet service provider. And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this!" They said, "We don't want this data retention; we want self-determination in the digital age," and we don't want phone companies and Internet companies to store all this information about us. They were lawyers, journalists, priests; they all said, "We don't want this!"

And here you can see: like tens of thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear!" Some even said, "This would be Stasi 2.0." Stasi was a secret police in East Germany. I also asked myself, "Does it really work? Can they really store all this information about us every time I use my mobile phone?" So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany. I asked them, "Please send me all the information you have stored about me."

I asked them once, and I asked again, but I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. But then I said, "I want to have this information because this is my life!" You are holding my calling, so I decided to start a lawsuit against them because I wanted to have this information. But Deutsche Telekom said, "No, we will not give you this information."

At the end, I had a settlement with them. I put down the lawsuit, and they will send me all the information I asked for because in the meantime, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this EU directive into German law was unconstitutional. So I got this ugly brown envelope with the CD inside, and on the CD, there were thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information.

At first, I saw it, and I said, "Okay, it's a huge file." But then, after a while, I realized this is my life—this is six months of my life in this file. I was a little bit skeptical: what should I do with it? Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. But then I said, "I want to go out with this information. I want to make some public because I want to show people what data retention means."

So together with "Stop Online Piracy Act" and "Open Data City," I did this. This is a visualization of six months of my life. You can zoom in and zoom out; you can rewind back and forth. You can see every step I take, and you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne and how often I call in between. All this is possible with this information. That's a little bit scary, but it is not only about me; it's about all of us.

At first, it's only like I call my wife, and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. Then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. After a while, you're calling, and you're calling, and you have this great communication network. But you can see how people are communicating with each other, what times I call each other, when they go to bed. You can see all this. You can see the habits, like who has a leadership role in a group.

If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, you can control your society. This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. This is a blueprint on how to surveil your society because do you know who talks to whom, who sends him an email? All this is possible if you have access to this information and these information has to be stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years.

Like I said at the beginning, you imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. The Stasi would have known who took part in this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who has the leaders behind it, this may have never happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not have happened, and in the aftermath also not the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. Self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction, but you have to fight for self-determination today. You have to fight for it every day.

So when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. When you go home, tell your representative: just because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you.

So in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.