Follow up on the movement of phone users in Spain
- From Monday to Thursday, both included, from 18 to 21 November, the National Statistics Institute (INE) will collect the location of mobile phone users from Spanish companies Orange, Movistar and Vodafone. Companies will collect the data anonymously and therefore do not know what they have addressed during those days. Users of Hego Euskal Herria, pay attention, have a phone from Vodafone and Orange, so their phones may be exempted from data collection.
Movistar does not have the possibility of being exempted from data collection. But if you have the phone of the other two, you can:
- For Vodafone, using the My Vodafone app (Android, iOS), follow the following options: My account > Permissions and preferences > Permissions, where to activate “I don’t accept that Vodafone gives anonymized data.”
- In the case of Orange, write to orangeproteccion.datos@orange.com indicating in the heading “data protection” and attaching the scanner image of the ID document.
The INE wants to collect the dates of the citizens’ movements in order to carry out their statistical surveys. In addition to the four working days of next week, two consecutive holidays will be monitored: 24 November (Sunday) and 25 December (Christmas Day). The experiment will be closed next year (20 July and 15 August) with the measurement of two holiday days.
The INE shall pay the telephone companies for the data: EUR 185,000 to Orange, 163,000 to Telefónica/Movistar and 150,000 to Vodafone. According to the INE, the geography of the Spanish State will be divided into 3,200 areas, each of them around 5,000 people theoretically. The phone data will indicate the number of people in each area at each time and the place where they move after hours and days. It is said that no data associated with the numbers or the names of the employees will be passed on to the INE: The number of phones is everything.
In fact, the telephone companies know at a given moment where you are. Our phones are constantly connected to an antenna, and when we move, we change the antenna. If the friend calls us, the company knows which antenna it has to send as soon as it receives a call. By court order, these data have already been communicated by the companies. If a specific event has occurred at the appointed time, the order collects the telephone numbers that were then connected to their antennas, and in the case of contracts, the identities of the users.
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