This is an extension of a post I made on a gun forum. Someone had asked the feasibility of the infrastructure required to store iPhone user’s GPS coordinates. They threw out the number of 30M iPhones.
It would really be the next logical step in police data collection. Take a warrant for arrest, pull phone records for $30, intercept the guy on his way home from his dealer’s house.
This wouldn’t be a burden placed upon the police, or even the NSA. It would be a money-maker for the telcos.
Lat/Lon can be packed as a 32-bit integer, unix timestamp is a 32-bit signed integer. Add in the telephone number and we’ll just call it 128 bits per reading.
Minutes in a day, 1440, so 1440×128 = 184,320 bits. 23,040 bytes per day.
As you can see, data warehousing for this is next to nothing. An 8GB disk could hold 372,827 days worth of GPS readings.
A day’s worth of GPS data for 30M users would be 675GB raw, before decompression and deduplication.
That would be a pretty tall order for a small business, but if you add in a few hundred legal spying data purchases every day, it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
You’d need a small cluster of servers and you would likely need good SAN hardware. They already store more information than this about the calls that you make. They already have the infrastructure in place.
So is it feasible? Yes, without a doubt.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
