Apple knows where you are

After the blowout Q2 results Apple is once again back in the news. Yesterday two programmers (Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden) gave this presentation in one of the technology conferences in San Francisco where they presented the data that iPhone and the 3G version of the iPad is secretly tracking the users information and the contents are stored in an unencrypted file which goes by the name of ‘consolidated.db’. This file contains the information in the form of latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. Pete Warden who is one of the presenter of this information was a former Apple employee and has developed a program if any one wants to take a look at what the data looks like. Please go to this link to download the software in order to view your data and where you have been in the last 10 months. There is an ongoing buzz about this as the privacy of millions of users is at stake.

Once you update your iOS version to 4.0 it started logging your position & location along with timestamp. Moreover when you sync the data of your iPhone to a computer this information will then be download to your computer in the form of an uncrypted file. There has been concerns that though iPhone hack is not easily possible but once this data comes to the hard disk of an computer it opens wide variety of opportunities for the hackers to misuse it. One thing of major concern is, why did Apple did not tell this to anyone and what will Apple use this data in the longer run for? I guess Apple can only answers this questions.

As per the latest information the issue has now got the attention of some of the politicians and as a result of that Senator Al Franken (Democrats of Minnesota) has send the letter to Steve Jobs asking him the reasons why Apple is secretly compling this data. Allan and Pete also checked with the security team at Apple about this and they are waiting for the response from Apple. I recommend going to this link in to get the technical know hows of this issue and watch the embedded video in order to know more details about that. Hope Apple will soon release a statement or a patch in order to fix it.

I am not trying to defend Apple but in the privacy policy which all of us blindly accepts and move on clearly indicates collecting your private and personal information. The policy last got updated on 21st June 2010 along with iOS 4.0. Please check the following snippets from the policy (courtesy - engadget):

We also collect non-personal information − data in a form that does not permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose.

We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.


If you don't want to wait for the patch from Apple and for personal piece of mind start backing up the contents of your iPhone using iTunes that will back up your data in an encrypted form. Good Luck with that and let's see what Apple has to say about all this.