Your iPhone is secretly tracking you all the time

By Rosa Golijan

Your iPhone has a hidden feature: It tracks and records your location constantly whether you want it to or not. What? You wish it wouldn't do that without your knowledge or consent? Too bad, because there's not much you can do about the tracking feature right now.

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, a pair of security researchers, recently discovered that iPhones — as well as 3G-enabled iPads — running iOS 4 constantly record and store their users' locations in unencrypted files. These files are basically very long lists of latitude-longitude coordinates and timestamps, and they can be found on the devices themselves as well as within the software backups saved on users' computers.

Since the tracking data files are unencrypted and unsecured, they can easily be viewed by someone who has physical access to your iPhone, 3G-enabled iPad, or the computer which contains your iOS software backups. As far as anyone can tell at this point though, the data can not be viewed by someone without physical access to those devices — unless you were to copy and send it to him or her, of course.

In order to demonstrate the extent of the data being recorded and stored, Allan and Warden have built and made available a Mac OS app called iPhone Tracker. If this app is opened on a Mac OS computer which has been used to sync an iPhone or 3G-enabled iPad, you will be able to view all the location data which has been recorded by your devices.I decided to try the app out on my own computer and I chuckled when I saw the first map:

(snip)
http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/04/20/6501660-your-iphone-is-secretly-tracking-you-all-the-time

Well worth a trip to the link.

You have to select the tracking option in your preferences. And any app that tries to use it must ask for permission to be granted before it gains access. This is a load of monkey juice.

:shrug:

According to the guy from Gizmodo in the first video, it's not an option.

Your only alternative is to download another program that runs constantly in the background, continually erasing that data file.

Would you like fries with that monkey juice?

The high minded purpose is to allow law enforcement track the movements of a suspect over a set period of time.

The creepier use is to allow a stalker to track his victim.

Sales are going to drop rather precipitously until they come out with a "there's an app for that!" commercial telling people how to either encrypt the data or disable the function.

I'm a Luddite, thank goodness.

As a fellow Luddite, I'll never own one of those things. I really don't even want the basic phone I've got now.

Now, if they start fucking with my Nook, I'll be pissed.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: