Volunteer in Spain. Detailed analysis of iPhone location data. After reading Pete Warden’s iPhone Tracker FAQ and the article by Alex Levinson, I wanted to extract the precise location information from the consolidated.db file from my iPhone backups to see exactly how accurate the location data were, as well as to learn how frequently the location was being sampled and saved.
Unfortunately, I had a rather busy week and wasn’t able to get around to it right away. Apple officially responded on Wednesday. While the statement itself is a masterful example of doublespeak, I was intrigued by the following paragraph: The iPhone is not logging your location. I thought it would be interesting to check the precise location information to see if the data bore out this description. Here is what I found: Since I often disable Wifi when I’m on the move to save battery life, the Wifi location data should be sparse and so I decided to concentrate on the CellLocation table. Raw iPhone location data (Tunisia) iPhone Tracker output (Tunisia) Like this: Like Loading... My iPhoneTracker Maps. Hacker News | Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release) You speak of the symptoms of the bug as if they were the bug, consider this one act play: • The internet claims Apple is tracking all iPhone owners! • Steve Jobs interrupts family time to exclaim "WTF!
" • SJ: "Minion! Verify this claim! " • Minion: "It is true, to the extent that we keep large, possibly unbounded, volumes of cell tower and wifi access point in the cache for the purpose of…" SNICKER-SNACK… thump. • SJ: "Engineering, fix this. . • Engineering to engineer: "Fix this. " • Engineer to self: "I do not know why this happens, I will search and uncover this bug.
" <<<--- there, that is where the bug is uncovered. . • Marketing: "What? DOWN CURTAIN // insert character development and pathos before first rehearsal. Petewarden/iPhoneTracker @ GitHub. This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn't record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer. Download the application Read the FAQ Authors Alasdair Allan (alasdair@babilim.co.uk) @aallan on Twitter Pete Warden (pete@petewarden.com) @petewarden on Twitter This application relies on map tiles from the volunteer-run OpenStreetMap project, so please consider supporting their great work.
Download Source You can download this project in either zip or tar formats. You can also clone the project with Git by running: $ git clone Is there a Windows version? Is there a Windows version? The file exists on PCs too, but we haven't written a version of the application that runs on Windows ourselves. How does the application work? How can I examine the data without running the application?
~/Downloads/iphonels.py | grep "consolidated" No. It’s unclear.
IPrivacy4IT – Clarinette's blog. Apple, Google Under More Government Privacy Focus. What's Good About iPhone's Location Tracking - Darkreading. The iPhone tracking disclosure this week showcases an unfortunate tendency for device manufacturers to focus excessively on their needs and forget those of their users Over the past week there has been a lot of time spent by seemingly outraged people finding that the iPhone tracks and records the user's location. The problem, as I see it, is that the file isn’t secure -- not that Apple was misusing the information, but there has yet been no identification of anyone misusing that information yet.
Granted, now that folks know it is there, that will likely change. I think the real problem with this capability whether it is found in an Apple or Android device (Android phones have this capability built in as well, and you can generally turn it off) is that it isn’t overt and used for our benefit. If it were, then it not only could be better protected but we might find the rewards greater than the risks.
Let me explain. --Rob Enderle is president and founder of The Enderle Group. More Insights. Apple, Google summoned to Senate hearing on mobile device privacy. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has called upon Apple and Google to participate in a hearing with the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in order to discuss consumer privacy. The hearing will take place on May 10 at 10am EDT in Washington, where witnesses from the US Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, Center for Democracy and Technology, and others will talk about what the latest mobile technology means for privacy and the law.
“Recent advances in mobile technology have allowed Americans to stay connected like never before and put an astonishing number of resources at our fingertips,” Franken said in a statement. “But the same technology that has given us smartphones, tablets, and cell phones has also allowed these devices to gather extremely sensitive information about users, including detailed records of their daily movements and location. Applesauce. Wendy M Grossman looks at the iPhone tracking 'scandal' and argues that it is just a symptom of a wider problem! Image: CC-AT-SA Flickr: bojo (Bobbie Johnson) Modern life is full of so many moments when you see an apparently perfectly normal person doing something that not so long ago was the clear sign of a crazy person.
They're walking down the street talking to themselves? They're *on the phone*. They think the inanimate objects in their lives are spying on them? They may be *right*. Last week's net.wars ("The open zone") talked about the difficulty of finding the balance between usability, on the one hand, and giving users choice, flexibility, and control, on the other. The story emerged this week when two researchers presenting at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference presented an open-source utility they'd written to allow users to get a look at the data the iPhone was saving.
So the news is not quite as bad as it first sounded: your device is spying on you, but it's not telling anybody. Steve Jobs On Location Data: "We Don't Track Anyone" Google Android, Apple iPhone geolocation tracking flap: Disclosure is everything. Yes, Apple and Google are recording your geolocation data. So what comes next? Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod. My phone is capturing all sorts of information about my personal whereabouts! Seriously, this is news? I mean, come on. How the heck do you suppose services like Latitude work? Look, your phones and tablets collect geolocation data.
Maybe. I think the greater issue is not "Oh my God, let's string Apple and Google up for caching/polling my geolocation information" but rather, "How can I as an informed consumer and user of devices which have integrated gelocation services understand precisely what is being collected from my device, and can I have any control over it? " We're living in an age where a lot of personal information about our lives are being collected. None of this should be news to anyone. It's all about the disclosure, period. But I think this applies to every sort of electronic service, not just the software that runs on our cellphones or tablets. This is very simple.
Sen. Kirk calls on Congress to investigate smartphone tracking - The Hill's Twitter Room. Apple & Google Location Tracking: A Breakdown of the Geolocation Crisis. With mounting concerns regarding the privacy of mobile data, two researchers from the United Kingdom stumbled upon a potentially-scary cache of coordinates in the backup archives of their iOS devices earlier this week. Shortly thereafter, many began to look for a similar data collection system in Google’s Android operating system, which was also evident in backup archives. In the few days that have passed between these discoveries and now, misinformation and accusations have dominated the blogosphere, muddling whatever useless information there is regarding the collection of geolocation information.
After taking a step back and observing the situation, let’s dive in and distinguish fact from fiction. Apple’s Location Logs As previously mentioned, two British researchers uncovered evidence that Apple has been caching coordinates in the backup archives of phones around the world. Above, I have posted the map of my movements. What has Apple been doing with this information? Should You Care? No, iPhone location tracking isn’t harmless and here’s why.
Just for @ruskin147 - where #iphonetracker has me in the UK for the last few months... - The Sound of Bill. Apple-patent-reveals-extensive-stalking-plans from gawker.com. Regarding this article: Gizmodo's sensationalism must be working, because I'm commenting. Let's stop and think for a moment. Apple files a ton of patents, many of which never ACTUALLY become real products or features. Anyone assuming that this is related to the tracking data is falling prey to the confirmation trap. That this patent exists is likely unrelated to the database stored on phones. Regarding the issue in general: It is important to differentiate between your iPhone collecting this data and Apple collecting this data.
I also find it difficult to listen to people complain about their movements being tracked when many smartphone users participate in Facebook Places, Google Latitude, Foursquare and Go-Walla. That being said, I'm a strong proponent of privacy, and I simply advise everyone to encrypt their backups and password lock their phones. Your life stopped being private the moment you started carrying around a cell phone. Sen. Kirk calls on Congress to investigate smartphone tracking - The Hill's Twitter Room. Apple's iPhones and Google's Androids Send Cellphone Location. US senator questions Apple for using phone-tracking software - The Economic Times. PTI Apr 22, 2011, 11.29am IST WASHINGTON: Concerned over latest research findings that i-Phone and i-Pads have been recording the device's location history, a top American Senator on Thursday shot off a letter to the Apple CEO Steve Jobs, demanding an explanation as to why his company was doing so.
"The existence of this information -- stored in an unencrypted format -- raises serious privacy concerns," Senator Al Franken wrote in his letter to Jobs. "Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of the user's home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken -- over the past months, or even a year," Franken said. Franken's letter comes a day after two research scientists - Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden - claimed that iPhone and iPads with iOS4 mobile operating system have been storing unencrypted and unprotected logs of users geographic coordinates in a hidden file. iPhone revealed to track, log users' locations | Mobile Technology - InfoWorld.
You may not know where you’re going in life, but you always know where you’ve been—and so does your iPhone. According to a story in The Guardian on Wednesday, the iPhone (and the 3G-enabled iPad) keeps a running log of its location and copies that information to your home computer whenever you connect to it. As such, the information—complete with latitude, longitude, and timestamps—can be easily reconstructed to show a person’s movements. Data scientists Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan discovered the cache of information; the two have written an application that you can run on your own computer to display the location information on a map, getting both an overview of every place you've been as well as stepping through the data by regular intervals. I’ve downloaded and run the program and can confirm that it lets me retrace my movements over the past ten months with a scary level of precision.
The purpose of the data itself is unclear, but it’s likely Apple stores it for testing purposes. Larry Magid: The Scary Implications of the iPhone Tracking Everywhere You Go (Video) Last Thursday I took the 4:00 PM Megabus from Boston to New York. I knew where I was going as did a few of my friends. AT&T has a record of the cell towers I accessed along the way, but they're not allowed to disclose that information without a court order. However, thanks to a tracking file stored on my iPhone and a recently released piece of software, anyone with access to my phone or my computer can find out exactly where I've been. Tracking software was able to follow me from Boston to New York. The software can zoom in for far more detail The presence of this tracking file was discovered by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden who disclosed their findings on the O'Reilly Radar blog and presented them at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (scroll down for a video of their presentation) Allan said that the phone contained "a year's worth of data for every cell that we've been through since we upgraded to IOS 4.
" It is not clear why Apple is storing this data on the phone. My Life According to the iPhone's Secret Tracking Log - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. I know I should be upset. Apple was secretly creating a log of all my travels by triangulating the nearest cell tower to my location. They've been doing it for a year and storing the data in an unencrypted file, and no one knows exactly for what purpose. "Okay, Apple, why is an iPhone log file recording lat/long location coordinates? Seriously, why? " observers like Declan McCullagh have rightly asked. So, yes, Apple should explain itself and/or just stop this data collection.
In the meantime, though, I've been playing with the software that the guys who discovered the logfile, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, released. I find the data is best at the metro-region scale. Out of curiosity, I'd love to see other people's maps. ACLU of Northern California : Your iPhone Knows Where You Were Last Night. Who Else Knows?
Votre iPhone enregistre vos déplacements à votre insu ! Cool or Creepy? Your iPhone and iPad Are Keeping Track of Everywhere You Go, And You Can See It - Kashmir Hill - The Not-So Private Parts. iPhone secretly tracks user location, say researchers. News April 20, 2011 01:47 PM ET Computerworld - A pair of researchers have found that Apple iPhones and iPads track users' locations and store the data in an unencrypted file on the devices and on owners' computers. The data, which appears to have been collected starting with iOS 4, which Apple released last summer, is in a SQLite file on iPhones and iPads with 3G capability, said Pete Warden, the founder of Data Science Toolkit and a former Apple employee, and Alasdair Allan, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter.
The same file, named "consolidated.db," is also stored in the iOS backups made by iTunes on the Mac or Windows PC used to synchronize the iPhone or iPad. Stored in the file in clear text are locations' longitude and latitude, a timestamp and other information, including Wi-Fi networks in range of the device. About 100 data points per day are logged to the file, said Warden and Allan in a video posted on the O'Reilly Radar blog.
Allan echoed Miller in the video. Secret iPhone Feature Tracks Owners' Whereabouts. Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know. iPhone Tracker application (plus a 32 bit version) | Julian Pistorius. If you haven’t heard yet, your iPhone creates a record of all the places you go, and the information is stored in a database on your computer whenever you sync with iTunes. See here for more information, and an application that will show you a map with all the locations you’ve ever visited with your iPhone: (Note: For a version that works on 32-bit Core Duo Macs, and one that runs on OS X 10.5 Leopard, see further down. For a Windows PC version, see right at the bottom of this post.) Here’s an example screenshot of the iPhone Tracker application: Screenshot of the iPhone Tracker app Apple doesn’t seem to be sending this information anywhere, but really, they shouldn’t be storing this much of this kind of information unencrypted in the first place.
The first thing you should do is enable encrypted iPhone backups so that other users and applications on your computer can’t access this information. iPhoneTracker_32bit_leopard.zip iPhoneTracker_32bit.zip.