The well-prepared mind

After reading Pete Warden’s iPhone Tracker FAQ and the article by Alex Levinson, I wanted to extract the precise location information from the consolidated.db file from my iPhone backups to see exactly how accurate the location data were, as well as to learn how frequently the location was being sampled and saved. Unfortunately, I had a rather busy week and wasn’t able to get around to it right away.

Apple officially responded on Wednesday. While the statement itself is a masterful example of doublespeak, I was intrigued by the following paragraph:

The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested… These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

I thought it would be interesting to check the precise location information to see if the data bore out this description. Furthermore, since I had precise GPS position data from the SPOT Messenger during a portion of the recorded time period, I was anxious to compare the coordinates to see how closely they matched.

Here is what I found: Continue reading →

I was alerted to today’s big news about the iPhone when richf posted about it on webdoc.com. His post lead me to the article on ReadWriteWeb that describes how iPhone software is automatically keeping a log of the phone’s location data and storing it in unencrypted files that are copied to any computer that synchronizes with the iPhone.

At this time, the location file does not seem to be sent to Apple, and the reason for the location tracking remains unknown, but it is very troubling that Apple would implement such a potentially harmful feature without protecting the data and without requiring user consent (or at the very least making a disclosure). I’m very disappointed at this news, because I’m otherwise a happy iPhone user (especially after spending 10 days with a Nexus during a trip to the US last month). Let’s hope it’s simply an very unfortunate error, although an error of such proportions should be more than enough to shake the confidence that most iPhone owners seem to have in Apple.

UPDATE (April, 21, 2:43 GMT) via a new post by richf on webdoc, I’ve read this excellent post by Alex Levinson who has been studying iOS Forensic Analysis for months. Apparently, this is neither a new issue nor a mystery.

Meanwhile, I downloaded the iPhone Tracker application from Pete Warden’s iPhone Tracker site and posted some screensnaps of the resulting location visualizations into richf’s webdoc. I can’t embed that post here, but this is what it looks like:

Continue reading →