iPhone tracks your location, stored on your Mac (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

You've probably read about this is the tech news today or yesterday. It's worth five minutes to download and run this app which illustrates the data stored for your iPhone.

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/


I'm ambivalent. The data is interesting. The idea of having a record of my travels is pretty cool...if I knew about it and had control over it, and its security. That it's secretly collected and secretly stored as unprotected plain text is unsettling..

 

[Sam Posten]

See this follow up:

http://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/3-major-issues-with-the-latest-iphone-tracking-discovery/

 

[DaveF]

Good followup. I need to read that more carefully later on.


That's why I tried to avoid histrionics in initial post: still trying to understand what this is, how it's used, and how it compares to everything thing else collected, stored, transmitted by my phone (OMG!!!111 My phone has all my friends' contact info on it!!!111)

 

[Sam Posten]

Update from Apple with very sane responses.


http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html


In it you will catch them doing something they almost NEVER do! They talk about an unannouced product!

 

[DaveF]

Read it. Surprisingly informative press release. The explanation that the location data is actually a cache of wifi hotspots and cell towers for rapid location services was new to me. I'm looking forward to the subsequent analysis and discussion of this from my favorite tech pundits.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Originally Posted by DaveF /forum/thread/310782/iphone-tracks-your-location-stored-on-your-mac#post_3805249

 

[DaveF]

Among others

 

[Sam Posten]

Here's two to get you started. I'm not smart enough of geo to dispute either of them.

http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/27/apple-posts-iphone-location-tracking-qa-complicated-ios-update-coming/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed


http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/27/we-translate-apples-qa-on-location-data-so-you-dont-have-to/A


nd another:

http://www.macworld.com/article/159516/2011/04/location_opinion_part2.html#lsrc=twt_macworld

 

[stevenoe]

This is very interesting because i read somewhere that the data is accessed through google servers.

 

[DaveF]

The iPhone data? It was only on the iPhone and the computer it synced to. It was not sent back in raw firm to apple, according to apple and other reports. Google had nothing to do with the iPhones location data and the data would never have been sent to google. Now android phones also have a similar behavior, but with a one week max capture. That data would be reported in some manner to google. Perhaps that's what you read.