Blog 7: China to Track Cell Phone Users

Matt Palmer

3/4/11

Blog 7: China to Track Cell Phone Users

In what seems a fairly transparent move, China announced its plans recently to track cell phone users for the purpose of better managing traffic, which is notoriously congested in Chinese cities (last August there was a sixty mile traffic jam lasting nine days).

Of course, as always with China, there is a worry that cell phone tracking can (and probably will) be misused for human-rights-violating surveillance. The country is certainly known for its use of technology to serve the interests of the country at all costs; it has blocked websites to keep worldwide anti-China sentiment off Chinese computers, even Google at one point. Not only that, but any info on Falun Gong, an outlawed religion in China, is completely inaccessible from within Chinese borders.

That China would use cell phones to track citizens is unfortunately not at all surprising.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2011/03/china_said_it_may_begin.html