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A Closer Look At The iPhone

Sen. Franken Quizzes Steve Jobs On iPhone Tracking

After Wednesday’s revelation that iPhones have been storing location data since iOS 4.0, now it’s time for the fallout. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was concerned enough about it to send Apple a letter, asking how and why this happened.
In the letter (full text here), Franken wants to know why Apple collected and compiled this data, why it wasn’t encrypted, whether it’s compiled on laptops, how it’s generated, how frequently the location data is recorded, how precise it is, who’s using the data and why consumers weren’t told about it.
Adding to this congressional inquiry was Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who is co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus. He wrote his own letter to Apple, asking “Is it an iPhone or an iTrack? Apple needs to safeguard the personal location information to ensure that an iPhone doesn’t become an iTrack.”
Why did Apple do this? Respected Apple watcher John Gruber writes in his Daring Fireball blog that he doesn’t have a definitive answer, but says he has some insider information about the location tracking on the iPhone, calling it “an oversight” on the part of Apple:

“…my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.”

Your iPhone's watching you. Should you care?

A peek at location data stored on an iPhone.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Researchers announced today that they found what look like secret files on the iPhone that track user location and store it on the device, without the permission of the device owner. It's unclear what the data is used for and why Apple has been collecting it in iOS products that carry a 3G antenna for nearly a year now.
Alasdair Allan, senior research fellow in astronomy at the University of Exeter, and writer Pete Warden, who discovered the log file and created a tool that lets users see a visualization of that data, say there's no evidence of that information being sent to Apple or anybody else. Even so, the pair note that the data is unencrypted, giving anyone with access to your phone or computer where backups may be stored a way to grab the data and extrapolate a person's whereabouts and routines.
To help users understand more about the data that's being collected, what the risks are, and what they can do about it, CNET has put together this FAQ.
Who are the researchers and how did they find this?
Warden, who used to work at Apple (though not on the iPhone), and Allan had been collaborating on some location data visualization projects, including a visualization of radiation levels over time in Japan after the earthquake, when Allan discovered the file on an iPhone. "After we dug further and visualized the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements," they wrote in a blog post.

Researcher: iPhone, iPad track users' whereabouts

A map showing location-tracking information from the iPhone.

(Credit: O'Reilly Radar)

Apple iPhones and 3G iPads running iOS 4 might be tracking their owners' movements, a new report from O'Reilly Radar claims.
Alasdair Allan, senior research fellow in astronomy at the University of Exeter, and writer Pete Warden say they have found evidence that the iPhone, 3G iPad, and backups on users' computers contain detailed location information, including latitude, longitude, and time stamps, that show where the mobile devices have been. In addition, the information is "unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device," they claim.