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Researchers Disclose iPhone and iPad Location-Tracking Privacy Issues

Warbrain said:
Shame that everyone is going to jump to conclusions rather than work out why this is stored.
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Shame that some people take privacy so lightly.

Who cares what application Apple is using it for? Really. How on Earth could that possibly matter. It's literally a log of all of your whereabouts that is kept on your phone and transferred to other machines in an unencrypted fashion, such that anybody who is aware of it can access it.

Even if there was a valid reason for Apple to a)have this info, and b)copy it without your consent to other machines, to leave it completely unencrypted is beyond the pale.

But hey, there a plenty of people who's attitude towards domestic warrantless wiretapping amounts to "Who cares, -I didn't do nuthin", so ambivalence on this issue is sadly, hardly surprising.
 
to put it in perspective, I take a lot of photos on my phone all of them are geotagged, all can be used to track where I've been, and will even show them all on a map.

as I say it is not as big an issue as can be made out (unless it turns out the data is transmitted to apple and 3rd parties which then I wouldn't like and would demand there is a way to turn off the transmission of the data.)
 
kavika411 said:
Indeed. You couldn't dumb down that statement if you tried. It's already reached bottom.

Go hang at dailykos.com. Macrumors appears to be above your pay-grade.
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How does it feel to be a minion/fanatic/plain stupid?
I always wonder as seems more and more are jumping that bandwagon every day.
 
Flake said:
The application is working terribly for me..I zoom into the map and it doesn't get any sharper, and lags horribly
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that app was hacked together as proof of what is possible - isn't meant to be a flashy app to show off .... but they released the source, so feel free to modify to fit your needs. - as for the legs for updating the map: earlier this morning it worked pretty smooth - not anymore - guess millions of users accessing the same map server is unexpected volume for this server.
 
androiphone said:
to put it in perspective, I take a lot of photos on my phone all of them are geotagged, all can be used to track where I've been, and will even show them all on a map.
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I can turn off geotaggning, there's a setting for it. Doesn't your Android phone allow that?

as I say it is not as big an issue as can be made out (unless it turns out the data is transmitted to apple and 3rd parties which then I wouldn't like and would demand there is a way to turn off the transmission of the data.)
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If Apple wants that data, they would probably get it from AT&T and Verizon.

No one has yet to give a good reason why the data is collected and stored on the phone. From the latest articles about it, there's nothing that indicates that the information is being sent to Apple or the carrier.

Good for you that you don't have a problem. Bad thing, there's a lot more people than you.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8H7)

Privacy and anonymity on the Internet and on cell phone networks have always been, and alway will be, nothing but illusions. Get used to it.
 
karsten said:
i'm tired of companies taking our privacy so lightly. makes a consumer feel like a dumb piece of meat. i hope someone files a lawsuit over this. any sneaky tactics like this should be outright banned by the government. maybe once we get some politicians of a younger generation in there who are more aware of these issues they will actually do something to protect the consumer from greedy and arrogant corporations. i hope but i'm not sure i will ever see this dream realized the way government currently lets companies run rampant.
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Uh, I miss the days when I was treated like a dumb piece of meat. :D
 
Kind of hard to understand why this isn't more transparent, even if it is just a GSM improvement "feature". I personally don't want someone stealing my laptop and knowing instantly where I live, work and travel. Now I know to encrypt the backups. Too bad Apple decided to bury this item within their endlessly long service agreement.

Unfortunately, for the 50 million iPhone users who didn't notice this article today, sucks that they're at risk of giving away their home/travel/work locations to the next person who steals their laptop (who obviously doesn't have the owner's well-being at heart).
 
kavika411 said:
Indeed. You couldn't dumb down that statement if you tried. It's already reached bottom.

Go hang at dailykos.com. Macrumors appears to be above your pay-grade.
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I'd understand why someone would argue that people with opposing views at RedState should go hang at dailykos. Or that people here with opposing views should hang at some Android forum.

But I don't get the idea that people here with opposing views should hang at dailykos?

I guess that tells a lot about your views.
 
At least other cell phone owners have the choice :). This is no surprise, Apple doesn't give users choice. They just provide a device. You don't have a choice. Get used to it.

Or do what the rest of us did and leave your iDevices behind for devices and companies that let you choose.

Who cares if you agreed to some TOS? No other "phone" out there is storing your Triangulated Data in a file on your phone and computer.

Prove me wrong, find a phone that does. There are none. This is unique to Apple.
 
aperry said:
Kind of hard to understand why this isn't more transparent, even if it is just a GSM improvement "feature". I personally don't want someone stealing my laptop and knowing instantly where I live, work and travel. Now I know to encrypt the backups. Too bad Apple decided to bury this item within their endlessly long service agreement.

Unfortunately, for the 50 million iPhone users who didn't notice this article today, sucks that they're at risk of giving away their home/travel/work locations to the next person who steals their laptop (who obviously doesn't have the owner's well-being at heart).
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And a spouse (for instance) who would want to spy on his wife will find this information, and he will also find that he actually might not need to have the phone in his possession for it either as long as the phone is being backed up.

It's a feature!
 
Hmmmm, section 4b of the agreement above says nothing about storing all of your location history in an unencrypted file that's included in your iPhone backups.

And apparently this continues tracking/storing even with location services turned off, which would contradict the section 4b statement entirely.

Soooooo.....can someone point me to the agreement that I made with Apple to store this data without my knowledge, even with location services turned off?
 
nightcap965 said:
With respect to all the "view with alarm" postings that will follow, this really doesn't mean anything. I leave my home at the same time every morning. The transponder in my car records my passage and debits my account with the state highway department. Traffic cameras record my license plate at several points during my journey. Once out of the car, my smiling phiz can be seen on any number of CCTVs en route to my office, whose door I open with a card that automatically records my entry. The IP address of this posting will reveal that I am sitting in my living room as I write. Even without the GPS turned on, my phone regularly initiates a conversation with the local cell tower. I can be found with almost pinpoint accuracy.

So I'm not exactly going to panic to learn that my computer and phone keep a record of my latitude and longitude that they don't share with anyone else.

The government already knows where I live, where I work, where I bank, and all kinds of other interesting information. It's how they collect their taxes and send me my mail.

If there were the slightest indication that liberals, atheists, and other enemies of the state were being tracked by their GPSes and rounded up, I'd be the first to the barricades. But there isn't. Our privacy is not based on "nobody knows", it's based on "nobody cares."
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Well said sir! (or madam!)
 
Seems to be only iOS 4

I have a 1st gen. iPhone which can't run iOS 4, so I'm stuck with the last iOS 3 version. My backups don't seem to have this data. It's an iOS 4 and later feature.
 
Ok, so it records both cell towers and and wifi. Big deal.

How do you people think that location services works for wifi only devices? They have to collect and update that information somehow now that Apple no longer uses Skyhook for their data. They probably collect this anonymous information to mine it for their location services for wifi based iOS devices and for speeding up AGPS on iPhones.

You have to have some way to collect locations of wifi hotspots and interpopulating that with known GPS and cell tower locations in order for location services on wifi to work at all. One way involves driving around with a vehicle and sniffing all of the wifi hotspots on each street but the more efficient way is to data mine it from gps based devices with wifi enabled like an iPhone.

It is not personal information, it is statistical data.
 
aristotle said:
Ok, so it records both cell towers and and wifi. Big deal.

How do you people think that location services works for wifi only devices? They have to collect and update that information somehow now that Apple no longer uses Skyhook for their data. They probably collect this anonymous information to mine it for their location services for wifi based iOS devices and for speeding up AGPS on iPhones.

You have to have some way to collect locations of wifi hotspots and interpopulating that with known GPS and cell tower locations in order for location services on wifi to work at all. One way involves driving around with a vehicle and sniffing all of the wifi hotspots on each street but the more efficient way is to data mine it from gps based devices with wifi enabled like an iPhone.

It is not personal information, it is statistical data.
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You are probably right. It's just Apple being Apple. While Google purchased a fleet of special (and very expensive) vehicles to collect map and wifi data, Apple decided to use its customers as mules and do it on a cheap.
 
aristotle said:
Ok, so it records both cell towers and and wifi. Big deal.

How do you people think that location services works for wifi only devices? They have to collect and update that information somehow now that Apple no longer uses Skyhook for their data. They probably collect this anonymous information to mine it for their location services for wifi based iOS devices and for speeding up AGPS on iPhones.

You have to have some way to collect locations of wifi hotspots and interpopulating that with known GPS and cell tower locations in order for location services on wifi to work at all. One way involves driving around with a vehicle and sniffing all of the wifi hotspots on each street but the more efficient way is to data mine it from gps based devices with wifi enabled like an iPhone.

It is not personal information, it is statistical data.
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Pretty sure it becomes personal when it's stored on your laptop!
 
AaronEdwards said:
I can turn off geotaggning, there's a setting for it. Doesn't your Android phone allow that?
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WTF I don't have an android phone!! go to Photos it has all your pictures by place

AaronEdwards said:
If Apple wants that data, they would probably get it from AT&T and Verizon.
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1. I don't live in the US so no apple can't, and
2. here in the UK we have specific laws on how your personal data can be shared, and pretty much the only way you could ever get a UK network to give up your data is a court order, this also specifically applies to companies sharing your info with other companies.

therefore in the UK apple could never get the info from the mobile networks, so they would have to (and have) build in the capability into the iphone.

not to mention iphones are sold sim free here, designed to be used on every network in the country and I severly doubt apple has gone to the trouble of signing location sharing deals with all of them, as it would be hideously impractical, much better to build it into the phone themselves.

AaronEdwards said:
No one has yet to give a good reason why the data is collected and stored on the phone. From the latest articles about it, there's nothing that indicates that the information is being sent to Apple or the carrier.

Good for you that you don't have a problem. Bad thing, there's a lot more people than you.
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like I said we all agreed to this location data collection in apples privacy policy and we have even agreed to have this information shared with 3rd parties (like I have already said there it doesn't look like it is being sent to apple), not reading the T&Cs or privacy policy (ie stupidity) is not a defence, https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/2...close-real-time-location-tracking-of-devices/

though like I have said if the data in the future does want to be sent to apple I would hope they have an opt out (like they do with targeted advertising by visiting a link in safari)
 
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Although this is not great news I'm not all that outraged. So it sees that I go to work every day in the morning and then come home at night. It's not telling anyone anything they wouldn't already know about me.

It's only on my phone and my computer. If I lose my phone or it is stolen, there are far more important things to me on there than my locations, such as contacts, emails etc;

Given Apples growth in recent years this is going to be big news globally, and not just on tech sites like this, its already on the BBC and UK newspapers too. I wouldn't be surprised if a statement was issued by Apple to address this because they are going to get hammered until they do, much like the iPhone 4 antenna issue.
 
aristotle said:
Ok, so it records both cell towers and and wifi. Big deal.

How do you people think that location services works for wifi only devices? They have to collect and update that information somehow now that Apple no longer uses Skyhook for their data. They probably collect this anonymous information to mine it for their location services for wifi based iOS devices and for speeding up AGPS on iPhones.

You have to have some way to collect locations of wifi hotspots and interpopulating that with known GPS and cell tower locations in order for location services on wifi to work at all. One way involves driving around with a vehicle and sniffing all of the wifi hotspots on each street but the more efficient way is to data mine it from gps based devices with wifi enabled like an iPhone.

It is not personal information, it is statistical data.
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Myself and others have asked this already but had you watched the video when you made the AT&T statistical data claim? (where had you heard that anyway?) It seems after a few flawed explanations you seem to come across as someone who has the definitive answer on what this is.

Why, may I ask, does it still record this "statistical data" when people have disabled location services?
 
what scares me is not that i said it was ok. I was aware that the phone kept a log, but is the fact that now police are allowed to search a phone as part of a traffic stop. I am ok with my nameless phone is sending my data to apple. I am not ok that i can not clear the local cache quickly before my phone is subject to search.
This is crazy is this file being harvested by police already?
http://www.examiner.com/libertarian...d-cell-phone-data-during-routine-traffic-stop

I just want to be able to dump it like i can safari cache. The only local resource in a situation listed above is to put the phone into wipe mode and have nothing left.
 
It's all well and good if you live in China and use an iPhone…and happen to disagree with the government. Then said government captures you and uses your iPhone to find the network of dissenters, safe houses and such.

Ah, it's so cool when government works with companies in this new technological era.

Maybe we'll get to live in an age when Wikileaks cannot exist anymore.
 
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