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Senator Asks Apple About Location-Tracking Issues as Experts Weigh In

EHUnlucky7x9@ao said:
So...this guy Levinson...he spends all his time breaking down all the data and info in iOS...and then writes a book about all the locations of these files and how to manipulate them?....and he complains how people may easily get hacked?

Hmm... I'm missing something here...
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Yeah, you are.

Levinson wasn't the guy complaining about that, he was the forensics guy.
 
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Storm in a tea cup!
 
Does anyone else really just not care about this? I could care less. It's not like the info is going to end up in China.
 
Just gotta ask...

WTF are bad actors? I can think of several, nay hundreds of bad actors...but I wouldn't necessarily put them in the same sentence with criminals.
Is this an "american thang"
Me British 😎
 
WiiDSmoker said:
What about Apple? Why don't they go after them for tracking every little thing you do with their services. If you want to talk about a company that violates & then documents our privacy go after Apple.

Don't be a fool.
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You sign up for that when you agree to their TOS and buy their products. I don't recall a single person signing off on having their wi-fi sniffed and recorded by Google's mapping cars. 😱
 
If this were Google or M$ you apologists would be foaming at the mouth. Nice fallacious argument - just because we can be tracked in our cars with traffic cams, or GPS devices, etc, doesn't mean this, or those instances are legal.

This is clearly in violation of EU law, for those of you who are interested:

http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/l14012_en.htm

We should at least be given the choice to opt-out, and the purposes and disclosure policies should be clearly stated, not buried in a 30-page ToS.
 
The thread is already de-railed and only 2 pages in?!

**Lets stay on topic everyone before I close the thread or put out warnings.**
 
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Once again, people are going off half cocked, without knowing anything about either the law or the technical details (and, sorry, but the details MATTER).
 
If someone breaks into my home and hacks into my Mac (using the OS X DVD to do a password reset), I have a lot more worries than whether they know how to find out what neighborhoods’ cell towers I’ve used! Luckily, encrypting your iPhone backup is simple, automatic, and unbreakable; and has the added benefit that then your iPhone’s keychain gets included in the backup. (Otherwise it doesn’t, with good reason.)

If, on the other hand, they steal my phone, they’re unlikely to stop me from remotely shredding it so fast their head spins 🙂

That said, dumping the old cached data is good practice, and Apple really needs to do so. I’d be surprised if they didn’t patch it to do just that. So: good catch! (Of course, this was noticed months ago.)
 
I'm betting it is a cache and somebody forgot to write code to cull the old data. Stupid mistake, in other words. Hopefully, Apple will say something either way.
 
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Good thing Al Franken is on the case...
 
One way they could alleviate the "issue" is to simply report the (anonymous) data more frequently, and then dump the cache. I wouldn't care as much about a week's worth of location data as opposed to months' worth.

(Incidentally: we have like/dislike buttons on a per-post basis now? 😕 )
 
nagromme said:
If someone breaks into my home and hacks into my Mac (using the OS X DVD to do a password reset), I have a lot more worries than whether they know how to find out what neighborhoods’ cell towers I’ve used! Luckily, encrypting your iPhone backup is simple, automatic, and unbreakable; and has the added benefit that then your iPhone’s keychain gets included in the backup. (Otherwise it doesn’t, with good reason.)

If, on the other hand, they steal my phone, they’re unlikely to stop me from remotely shredding it so fast their head spins 🙂

That said, dumping the old cached data is good practice, and Apple really needs to do so. I’d be surprised if they didn’t patch it to do just that. So: good catch! (Of course, this was noticed months ago.)
Click to expand...

Yep, both of these are good points.
 
Al has his reasons to be concerned.

alfranken-thumb-thumb.jpg
 
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dietwater5 said:
If you have a passcode on your phone then you cant sync/create a backup if your phone was lost or stolen
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Sorry, but this is wrong. While it may slow some down, there are ways around this.
 
840quadra said:
There is a reason that some of us Jailbreak, outside of the desire to add applications outside of the appstore.
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Apple hackers develop better jailbreaks now so they can keep up with the superior system Android has.

There's so much more one can do with Android.

After having every iPhone, I tried Android and I'm so amazed at their great capabilities.

Android is awesome.

That said my Iphone 4 is best as an iPod replacement.

I have the best of both worlds.
 
It's not a terribly big concern for everybody I'll admit but for those it is a concern to, this is a sale killer for all of these little GPS enabled electronics. Their safety is worth waay more to them than some piddly little iToy or other GPS enabled microdevice. Even normal cell phones and credit cards allow for too much risk.
 
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