zlacker

> 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?

If this surprises you, what do you think the carriers did with all their SMS traffic?

>>gumby+(OP)
I worked the SMS department of a major carrier about 15 years ago.

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.

>>themer+E5
> Long term storage would have been crazy expensive

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...