(South China Morning Post) Beijing to track all mobile phone users' movements

Beijing to track all mobile phone users' movements

Government to monitor 20m people

Stephen Chen

Updated on Mar 03, 2011

Talk about Big Brother! Every Beijing mobile phone user will be tracked through the use of the latest global positioning technology, the municipal government announced on Tuesday.

The project, called the Information Platform of Real-time Citizen Movement, aims to watch over more than 20 million people in Beijing 24 hours a day, local media said yesterday. Wherever you are - whether in the bathroom, on the subway or in Tiananmen Square - the government will know.

Wireless communication experts said the system would be particularly useful not only for following the whereabouts of individuals but also in detecting any unusual gathering of a large number of people.

It is unknown whether the government launched the project to prevent a "jasmine revolution" or other social unrest, but with the help of supercomputers, officials will know where the next gathering spot is before protesters get there.

Li Guoguang - deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, which worked on the project with China Mobile and, presumably, the two other state-owned mobile service providers, China Unicom and China Telecom - told the Beijing Daily that the project would be used only to ease traffic jams.

Using data provided by mobile service providers, the government would know the population distribution and movement of the city with unprecedented accuracy, Li said.

"To some degree, [the project] can effectively increase citizens' travelling efficiency and ease traffic jams" by giving officials information such as which subway line was crowded, which bus line was filled and which road was congested, Li was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Citizens could get the information but would have to pay, he said.

Li said sensitive information, such as who was where and in which direction they were heading, would be kept within the government.

How many people were in the Wangfujing shopping district, heading to the front door of the McDonald's restaurant there and staying for a couple of hours - information related to calls for a Chinese "jasmine revolution" on the past two Sundays - would not be available to the public, even for a fee, but government agencies such as the Public Security Bureau would know.

China National Radio said the municipal government hoped to start the project in the densely populated Tiantongyuan and Huilongguan areas in the first half of this year.

Chen Derong , professor of wireless communications at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommications, said mobile positioning technology was based on a simple theory of radio communication.

A mobile phone constantly beams out signals to radio receivers built by service providers, mostly antennae on steel towers. Each radio wave arrives with different timing, and by calculating these differences, the service provider can pin down the location of an active phone.

"Beijing's plan is to integrate the three different mobile service providers into one platform so that everyone with a power-on cell phone can be tracked," Chen said.

"Certainly the use of the platform will not be limited to gathering traffic information. Officials in other areas, such as anti-terrorism and stability maintenance, will also find it useful."