Should we be surprised?
Our Grocery stores track what we purchase, and everyone said "oh well, cheaper prices" (BS But okay).
Our ISPs track our information, even hijack DNS error pages now. Everyone said "Oh well, they are a business"
Now this, and I guarantee it will be "Oh well, they are a business that needs to make money"
I think there is a difference between the tracking the grocery store is doing and the tracking a phone company is doing. At a grocery store, it is completely voluntary. Customers do not have to have tracking numbers (I, for one, have never had one). If they do choose to have their purchases tracked, they are "paid" for it in discounts. And that tracking is limited to what the customers purchased and perhaps the store they purchased it in.
Cellphones, on the other hand, are tracking your physical location at any given time. No announcement is given, and customers get no discounts or other rewards for using cellphones. In fact, cellphone companies, while creating and probably selling this valuable data, are constantly looking for ways to charge their customers more money for service. In addition to all this, in the US, all or nearly all of the major cellphone carriers were complicit in sharing this information with the federal government unlawfully and pushing for unconstitutional laws to back out of it.
Online tracking is often not connected to one's real identity. In fact, this is why so many people are alarmed when they talk about being able to identify people by their habits. It is getting more and more difficult to remain anonymous, and that is obviously a threat to privacy. Cellphones are always tied to identity, even more than Internet access. A cellphone is with you wherever you go and whatever you do. Connections to the Internet can be made and severed, and there is no way to be certain that a given individual is behind a given computer. With cellphones, again, this is not the case. People occasionally loan their cellphones to other people, but not with near the frequency with which people borrow others' computers (Corporations are trying to change this with dumb Internet devices like the Ipad).
So much more private and individually traceable information is available to cellphone carriers that it could almost be separated into its own league of privacy discussions. As more and more people access the Internet through their cellphones, the shift away from privacy will be even more dramatic and frightening than it was over the last decade. If anyone is considering a privacy Bill of Rights, it should start with the cellphone carriers. They are probably the biggest single enemy of privacy the public has ever faced.