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
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.
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. 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. 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 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) The pair had been working on data visualization projects including creating a map of radiation levels in Japan and were looking into ways to visualize mobile data when they discovered the file. Senator has questions
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.
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.
Apple's iPhones and Google's Androids Send Cellphone Location 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. 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.
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. 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. Releasing an open-source application that displays hidden files, the coordinates are decrypted quickly and provide one with an intuitive map, like the one that appears below. Google’s Coordinate Cache
Google Android, Apple iPhone geolocation tracking flap: Disclosure is everything Yes, Apple and Google are recording your geolocation data. So what comes next? Ohmygod. 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. This cannot be that hard for these companies to do.
Steve Jobs On Location Data: "We Don't Track Anyone" 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? 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. The question is: how best can consumers be enabled to make informed decisions? Wendy M.
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. Device privacy has been an increasingly important topic to lawmakers in recent years, but discussion came to a head last week when two researchers revealed that the iPhone and 3G iPad keep a log file of every location the user has ever been, whether the iOS Location Services are turned on or not.