Thursday, April 21, 2011

O'Reilly Apple location tracking

oreilly apple location trackingToday O’Reilly writers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allanill reported the discovery that new iPhone models by Apple, and a 3G iPad running iOS 4, is regularly recording the location of the device into a some file on device's disk. Devices running iOS 4 are storing a log with device's locations captured using cellular network signal data and time stamps. Moreover this database is not encrypted by any means. The database is being restored across backups, and synchronized using iTunes sync.

The authors created simple tool named iPhoneTracker which access this file and shows all your tracking info on the map.

Original article about this privacy issue you can read here. There are two solutions to stop your iPhone to spy on you: the first one is to encrypt your backups in iTunes, and the second one is owners of jailbeaked devices. With Sydia you can install tool "untrackerd". This tool will periodically clean stored tracks from your device.