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Researchers Disclose iPhone and iPad Location-Tracking Privacy Issues

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Gotta love the people who repeat the ancient Malthusian phrase, "if you don't gave anything to hide..."

Look up freedom in the blanking dictionary.
 
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kuebby said:
"When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."
-Martin Niemöller

Not trying to be a aluminum foil hat theorist here but this is the kind of small first step that leads us down a dark path to a "Minority Report" kind of future.
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Actually it is not like that at all.

oban14 said:
I can't believe how many of you are OK with this. You spend hundreds on a phone, 75 on up for monthly usage, and on top of it they track and store your movements for reasons unknown without any consent or knowledge on your part.

It's really time for consumers and potentially the government to step up and put a stop to this. No one has a right to any information they don't willingly ask for and you don't willingly provide - and a 20 page EULA isn't acceptable.
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My movements are not secret.

Anyone could wait for me outside my home every day and follow me anywhere I wanted and keep track of it if they wanted to...

That would be 100% legal.

Someone accessing this information from your device would actually be a crime... It is a crime with no real value as it relates to me.

Too much knee-jerking going on here... It is like people don't actually think and analyze things for what they are but they just see the word privacy and they freak out.

My every day movements are not private. If they were tracking my movements inside my house that would be private. Tracking me going from one public place to another is not private information in any way shape or form.

pmz said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Gotta love the people who repeat the ancient Malthusian phrase, "if you don't gave anything to hide..."

Look up freedom in the blanking dictionary.
Click to expand...

It is accurate though, this does not infringe on my privacy nor does it inhibit my freedom. In fact the existance of this is PROOF i have the freedom to go anywhere I freaking want to go, I just choose not to... :) Do you understand what freedom is? How does this inhibit your freedom in any way shape or form? You have no idea... Do you.
 
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I'd sure hate for the guy who steals my phone to then have :

- My home address and work address
- A full history of my routine with precise times of departure/arrival and where

Section 4B says that the location data is kept in a way that makes it non-identifiable to me. Well, if it's sitting on my phone, it identifies me pretty well. Seems this consolidated.db is running afoul of Section 4b, contrary to what people are stating here.

The simple fact is, this file should be regularly flushed by the OS. Why is it keeping a full history ? What purpose does a full history serve, with such ridiculously small polling window ? Why is it continually polling anyhow ? It should poll my location only when I am using a service that requires it then and there, otherwise it should not be collecting location data and storing it.

There is obviously something amiss. I suspect this is more a bug than anything and that it shouldn't retain the data indefinitely.

As for anyone spouting off "I have nothing to hide", I dare all of you to read this essay by someone much more qualified in the field of privacy than you obviously are :

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

abstract :

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
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I don't understand how people think this is some big conspiracy. We don't know what the purpose of that file was, it could be some garbage code Apple forgot to Delete after extensive testing of the iPhone itself. Its not like its a GPS tracker and pinpointing your movements by the Foot. Its obviously either A. Some kind of testing files that never got deleted, or B. Part of the iAd initiative that you can opt out of, using your location via Cell Towers instead of GPS.

It doesn't know what stores you've been in, or which house is yours.

If someone got ahold of a backup file, you got a LOT more to worry about then which cell towers your phone accessed. Could be cached data on the towers.

Which makes me think, AT&T has a App that allows one to point out issue areas in service quality and where service is Null, I think AT&T might be using these files to help said service.
 
Considering that my iPhone 3G consistently thinks I'm in other Asian countries...or Texas (whether on EDGE, 3G or wifi), I have nothing to worry about...except that my Maps location is useless :rolleyes:
 
marksman said:
I do wonder how many guys will be borrowing their wives phones tonight to do an "update" on it, as they dump their whereabouts for the last year though.
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I secretly keep tabs on my wife using FindMyIPhone - I've seen nothing suspicious yet, but you never know ...
 
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I found out something even worse... The backup file also contains my full SMS messages (sent and received) and call history and also all my email. I cannot believe Apple would do this. :mad:
 
marksman said:
Actually it is not like that at all.



My movements are not secret.

Anyone could wait for me outside my home every day and follow me anywhere I wanted and keep track of it if they wanted to...

That would be 100% legal.

Someone accessing this information from your device would actually be a crime... It is a crime with no real value as it relates to me.

Too much knee-jerking going on here... It is like people don't actually think and analyze things for what they are but they just see the word privacy and they freak out.

My every day movements are not private. If they were tracking my movements inside my house that would be private. Tracking me going from one public place to another is not private information in any way shape or form.



It is accurate though, this does not infringe on my privacy nor does it inhibit my freedom. In fact the existance of this is PROOF i have the freedom to go anywhere I freaking want to go, I just choose not to... :) Do you understand what freedom is? How does this inhibit your freedom in any way shape or form? You have no idea... Do you.
Click to expand...

So if Apple hired private investigators to follow every single iPhone and iPad user constantly, 24 hours a day, you wouldn't have a problem with it would you? You don't think it should hurt their sales or people should be opposed to it?

Just because it's legal for me to stand on the sidewalk in front of your house and scream 24 hours a day doesn't mean you should be OK with it.
 
indiekiduk said:
I found out something even worse... The backup file also contains my full SMS messages (sent and received) and call history and also all my email. I cannot believe Apple would do this. :mad:
Click to expand...

Where can you see this? Instructions please!
Tx
 
Encrypting the database file on the device would not provide any decent protection, as the iOS software itself would have to have the decryption key to be able to write to this file.
 
iMouse said:
Looks as if the data is more or less for AT&T's purposes than for Apple's. A lot of the data is in a grid form on the map, possibly using tower triangulation to determine signal issues in a given area.

The dates coincide with the release of iOS 4 for sure.

Still not cool that this is being pushed to backups and appears to keep a never-ending history on the device unless restored and set up as new.
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Just how long do you think it would take to fill up the memory on the phone if it kept your "never-ending history on the device"?

And if you are not doing illegal activities that result in your being detained by the authorities, who would ever access the GPS info on your phone?

Local TV stations are having a field day with this news.
 
KnightWRX said:
I'd sure hate for the guy who steals my phone to then have :


The simple fact is, this file should be regularly flushed by the OS. Why is it keeping a full history ? What purpose does a full history serve, with such ridiculously small polling window ? Why is it continually polling anyhow ? It should poll my location only when I am using a service that requires it then and there, otherwise it should not be collecting location data and storing it.

There is obviously something amiss. I suspect this is more a bug than anything and that it shouldn't retain the data indefinitely.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I can't think of any legitimate use for this behavior. Even if there was some advantage to knowing the places you spend time, it wouldn't need to know dates and times. I suspect a bug (because I hope something more nefarious isn't going on).
 
So I just want to clear on this. You people complaining about this do not want to have AGPS or any sort of location services on WIFI only devices? Is that what you want or do you believe it is supposed to work through "magic"?

If someone steals your phone, they probably have much more information on you than what can be found in that file and if you really value your privacy so much then you should consider having remote wipe capability through mobile me.
 
duaneu said:
Mine also shows dots in Las Vegas, even though I haven't been there since I got the iPhone.

Hmm...that's near Area 51, isn't it?
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I also have dots in Las Vegas, even though I haven't been there in 10 years.

For the whole last decade, 99.5% of the time I've willingly kept a device within 15 feet of me that constantly transmits my location up to Big Brother. I just can't get that worked up about this.
 
aristotle said:
So I just want to clear on this. You people complaining about this do not want to have AGPS or any sort of location services on WIFI only devices? Is that what you want or do you believe it is supposed to work through "magic"?

If someone steals your phone, they probably have much more information on you than what can be found in that file and if you really value your privacy so much then you should consider having remote wipe capability through mobile me.
Click to expand...

What are you talking about? AGPS does not require that the phone keep a timestamped log of everyplace I've been. That's not at all how AGPS works.

Even if there was some reason for it to cache locations for a bit, there is no reason for it to keep track of it for more than a year, across backups, etc.
 
evill33t said:
i made a googlemaps based version, with non reduced accuracy and the option to load the consolidated.db from the filesystem

check it out
http://mac-and-i.blogspot.com/2011/04/myphonetracker-analyze-iphone.html
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Thank you. Is there a program which actually shows us the time/date at which the phone tracked our location? I know there is the Timestamp in the database, but how do we translate this into a readable format? My database file is over 5 Megabytes, seems to be a lot of crap in it.

I remember my good old Siemens SL45 phone basically did the same thing, it did not store the info in a database however. But there was a hidden function (Net Monitor) on this phone which displayed this info in real time.
 
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