> But why are carriers storing this tracking information for more than 24 hours, unless of course it's by government demand.
This information can be invaluable in crime investigations. Think if you're abducted and manage to keep your phone with you and on - they can track it.
It's a situation where the data can be valuable, but someone needs to watch the watchers.
There's actually a very controversial new EU doctrine that mandates telcos of all member countries to store "connection data" (I only know it by the German word "Verbindungsdaten", which encompasses when you called whom, which websites you visit, who you send email to etc, but not the actual data contained in those transactions) for at least 6 months.
While some countries (like, surprisingly, my native Austria) where actively against the new law for along time, in the end they caved to pressure from the EU (very unsurprisingly). Interestingly, the telcos themselves were against it, since they have to bear most of the costs themselves.
So yes, they do record everything you do, all the time, for everyone in Europe.
Edit: reading up on it again just now (I stopped keeping up on this stuff since it's just so damn infuriating/depressing), the EU doctrine is still much more contested than I thought, lots of countries still refusing to abide by the law. Though I fear they'll all cave eventually...
I imagine it would make sense to keep records for a few billing cycles. It wouldn't be unreasonable to have to deal with a customer dispute 3-6 months in the future. But I imagine it's also just plain easier to truncate the logs every six months or every year.
Well I guess roaming charges are getting a bit passe these days, but I could still see someone arguing they were never in Niagara Falls, or that they were on the American Side (normal rate) and not the Canadian Side (crazy rate.)
But in principal, I can see why a company would think any and all info they have might be useful in a dispute.
You could still keep a record of all calls made, and the tower(s) used to make each call, without getting down to this level of granularity. I might be wrong here, but it seems that they're storing a stream of triangulated location data for a given handset, regardless of the actual network activity like calling.
Let's say that the carriers only stored call records with tower IDs for each call. If there was a dispute every so often because a call was made on a close-by tower that itself happened to be located in a different toll bracket (resulting in an incorrect overcharge to the customer), I'm sure the carrier would happily write off that charge if you disputed them about it, which is probably what they'd do right now anyway.
There must be another reason they're keeping it, even if it's just a case of it being super-cheap to store, and they think that they might figure out something to do with it later.
The discussion included that they use it for modeling traffic patterns and areas to help them plan capacity and new towers. I'm sure they use it for other things as well.
But why are carriers storing this tracking information for more than 24 hours, unless of course it's by government demand.