Aral Balkan

Twitter has been ablaze recently with revelations that iPhones and iPad 3Gs are secretly recording your every move, and have been doing so for about a year now.

According to Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, the duo who made the discovery, the information is stored in a file that is backed up to your computer and survives handset upgrades:

What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device. It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands. Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released.

The duo also have an open source Mac app call iPhone Tracker that you can use to visualize your own location data. The screenshot at the top of this post is a portion of mine from this past year, limited to the area around the UK (the actual data ranges to the US and various Scandinavian countries).

According to Alasdair and Pete, there is no reason to believe that the data is being communicated to Apple. Still, though, the fact that Apple did not disclose that it was recording this information doesn't sit right with me even if it feels more like an oversight than a malicious act. I hope they will issue a statement on the matter to clear things up.

All that said, a lot of us do disclose our locations via services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and – for the masses – Facebook checkins. The difference, of course, is that you are aware of the fact and engage in it willingly.

Comments

• This was not a discovery so much as a news story. The iphone location recording 'feature' has been known about for a long time prior to this announcement in the security/law enforcement world. see: https://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/3-major-issues-with-the-latest-iphone-tracking-discovery/

  by Jim Hald on 2011-04-25 16:28:54

• the fact is - there is no anonymity in a network at all. tame down

  by serg on 2011-05-11 22:30:55

• Aral, it's a bit sinister but I suppose it's no more data than that held by mobile phone companies. In a way, at least we can have access to our own location data but the biggest issue is that we would never have known about it had those researchers not discovered it.

  by Neil Trodden on 2011-04-21 12:11:53

• If you encrypt your iPhone/iPad backups, via an iTunes setting, it looks like apps like iPhoneTracker can't get access to the location data, which is good news. However, it still doesn't remove the privacy concern whereby Apple could retrieve and share the data from your local machine.

  by Simon Whatley on 2011-04-21 13:07:11

• This has been an interesting situation to watch. First there was the scandal and outrage ("Apple is a horrible company! They've deceived us!"), but because Alasdair and Pete's article was accompanied by their mapping code-- quite soon thereafter came the "Ooh, look. Shiny!" response. These maps are a reflection of our activity and data that we don't often see. ("Goodness, I'm well travelled!" "I've spent too much time on the M4." Etc.) I suspect that appeals to some of our vanity and curiosity about ourselves-- we generally like that stuff. My Twitter stream and Facebook feed are full of people posting their maps-- even those I would've expected to be ranting for public apologies and compensation from Apple. I have no idea how this will play out, but thus far it seems to me that our joy at learning more about ourselves can somewhat mitigate against the upset this might have caused. Who'd've guessed?

  by Hadley Beeman on 2011-04-21 15:02:44

• I think the facts that are described in this post are much funnier than all the buzz. http://bit.ly/hXCLmt The great discovery was already published in a book.

  by Maxim Zaks on 2011-04-21 16:36:24

• I'm always blown away that people are surprised by this stuff. All of this massive companies are greedy and are out to make as much money as they can. if that means storing your personal data for future sales to other companies, I doubt one of them would think twice about doing it. One reason I keep my life simple and most of my personal data OFF the internet.

  by Rachel on 2011-05-28 08:25:23