And I obviously know phones continuously ping cell towers.
So that means somewhere out there, there's a database of all cell phones and their locations for all time, with fine-grained resolution? They don't ever delete it, at least not in the last 10 years?
Or it's 1 database per cell provider ? I guess phones ping towers that are not owned by the company that provided the phone
I'd be curious if anyone has a link to a good summary of how this works, and the location tracking implications. Do they have to do a subpoena, or is it just a big database everyone's doing joins against? What's the resolution of the data?
I knew that people obviously get caught due to cell phone tracking -- it comes up in every one of these cases, like the Idaho killer recently. But I'm slightly surprised they reached back 10 years and did it
If this surprises you, what do you think the carriers did with all their SMS traffic?
We only kept messages for about 2 weeks.
Long term storage would have been crazy expensive and I'm pretty it's illegal to mine that data.
Not really, an SMS is probably only 200-500bytes to store with metadata so let’s say 1kb just for simplicity.
This site estimates 8.4 trillion SMS per year, globally [0].
So that’s only 8.4trillion kb or 8.4 petabytes.
That’s big, but that’s the whole world.
For comparison, google stores about 2,500 petabytes per day. [1]
So I would guess that not only do they store this forever. There’s also lots of copies and that there’s probably LE firms mining texts for all sorts of pattern recognition, AI stuff.
[0] https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-many-text-messages-are-sen...
[1] https://skill-lync.com/blogs/how-google-handles-over-40000-p...