EXPOSED: Your iPhone is Tracking You

Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move
By Audrey Watters / April 20, 2011 7:16 AM / 22 Comments
Hacker News
Share & Save

apple_logo_150.jpgResearchers have discovered that the iPhone is keeping track of where you go and storing that information in a file that is stored - unencrypted and unprotected - on any machine with which you synchronize your phone. It is not clear why Apple is collecting this data.

Data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden came across the file - "consolidated.db" - while they were thinking about the potential trove of mobile data stored on a cellphone and thinking about ways to visualize this data. Allan and Warden will present their findings today at the Where 2.0 conference.

While it is not unusual for cellphones to track users' location, that information is typically kept behind a firewall and it requires a court order for others to be able to access it. This isn't the case with this particular file, raising serious questions about privacy and security.

A word from our sponsor:
Meshin Bring order to communication chaos. Meshin pulls critical people and their messages to the top. Finally the fragmented conversation is whole! Sign up for the very private mobile beta today.

Ad powered by BTBuckets
Tracking Your Coordinates Since iOS4

The file contains longitude and latitude data, recording the phone's coordinates along with a timestamp. This recording process seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update, which means that there could be almost a year's worth of location data stored - literally hundreds of thousands of data points. While the coordinates aren't always precise, they are nonetheless incredibly detailed. It appears that the location is determined via cell-tower triangulation, but the timing of these recordings varies.

It isn't clear why the iPhone is tracking this data, although the possibilities for location-based features are endless - location-based advertising, geofencing apps, and so on. Although the iPhone data is stored on back-up files when the phone is synced to another computer, it doesn't appear that the data is transmitted to Apple. Nevertheless, the iPhone appears to be unique in this type of tracking, and according to Warden, other phones do not record user's location in the same way; the two researchers have not been able to find comparable tracking systems on Android phones.

Although Google's Latitude, for example, can track your location and lets you give that information to your contacts, it is something you need to opt in to. With the iPhone, you have no such option. There is no way to delete the file, as it will simply be restored, but you can encrypt your iPhone back-ups to make the information somewhat less accessible.
Your Location Data - Unencrypted, Visualized

And that is another crucial part of this problem: in addition to the existence of the tracking mechanism, the information is incredibly accessible. To demonstrate this, Warden and Allan have created a simple downloadable app that will let Apple users check to see what location information has been stored. The app is fascinating, but also pretty frightening as it demonstrates that anyone with access to your phone or to your back-up files will be able to see where you have been since you installed iOS 4 on your phone.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• 423b

[MRBLACKPEARL04]

All smart phones track, hear,and watch you!! Don't you love "freedom" LOL

[stevenojops]

Some fandroid still dreaming lol.

[segr3do]

I just turned off the location services and the iPhone does not record any of my moves. You can test it. On the Android is the same thing.

[Svilenkonac]

Apple just die .