[NEWS FLASH: Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.]
Apple! Please fix stupid ...
We all love Apple for all the products that they come up with. At times, we also cringe at their overprotectiveness of interests: like blocking flash, not allowing scripts, not allowing real background processing, muscling publishers to give a cut to Apple in subscriptions and sales but this latest one is truly absurd.
If the reports from Where 2.0 conference are true, then someone needs to take a real deep look at what is going on inside Apple. The new bunch of over-zealous managers are thinking features sans compliance (who we still love as they are very bright individuals) and are acting like mindless soldiers to a few who are running this company with an iron grip and laying the foundation of a highly intrusive monopolistic technology org that makes mockery of all international rules just because they get a few products right. Someone needs to stop this absurdity either from inside apple or through government regulation. Someone needs to question the people who are making these calls.
Its is pretty scary when you associate location information with the demographics of people who use iPhones. Believe you me, someone has got a handle on 75% of wealth on this planet. There are huge business, social, and political ramifications of a small act of recording location information on subscribers / users of the phone. I will not preach but who so ever did this at Apple or the provider, my friend you are plain stupid (blinded by recent success) and few can fix stupid on this planet, they come in all shapes and forms.
Is anyone at Apple listening? Whats going on buddies? Hey you bright apples, find the bad apple in your team and fix stupid!
Note: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of any organizations I am associated with.
Yes this was one of the most potential exploit that iPhone 4 had and an interesting one too. While apple still believes this has been done to improve the accuracy by inbuilt applications it still infringes the privacy of users. At least they could have encrypted the contents after showing some warning/alert message to the users.
btw…Even Google is not perfect with respect to this case. A recent Lawsuit filed against Google on Android’s Location collector is worth 50$ million. Phew !.
Will the list expand…?
As far as my guess goes Apple wanted to do something good for its consumers by helping them to find their lost device with “Find My iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch” feature which got debuted in iOS 4.2, but instead ended up getting criticized.
Apple might have been storing user demographics for this feature. The one mistake they did was not encrypting the details. Come on Apple give us an iOS update fixing this.
Taking some one’s private information without informing the user is not right. I think it is the mistake of some Apple developer’s who must have unintentionally left the log file, used for debugging purpose.
If they wanted to use that information they would have encrypted that file so that no one would have know what the file contains.
From my point,Apple have not done this intentionally.That might be some bug while collecting nearest hotspots to improve network connectivity.
There is a lesson in this issue for every techie in this globe, We should not play with user’s privacy in any case.Whatever may be the product and features , user’s privacy should be taken care from beginning to end.
Soon Apple will give batch update with this issue fixed.
Although it is a risky thing that Apple tracks the location information of the user and stores in an unencrypted file, an update iOS4.3.3 is expected to be available in next few weeks. In that update, location information is not transferred to the iTunes when a synch is performed. Also, Apple gives an option where user can turn off tracking the information and the file will be deleted entirely when location services are turned off by the user. This is good news to hear from Apple. Expecting the update to be released soon.
Finally iOS 4.3.3 and iOS 4.2.8 updates are out. The description from Apple’s support site on these are as follows,
This update contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache including:
1. Reduces the size of the cache
2. No longer backs the cache up to iTunes
3. Deletes the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off