What the cellco has on you is now basically being mirrored in a file on your iPhone or iPad without any kind of encryption, and is also being copied to your computer. In the US, however, regular people cannot access that data-law enforcement must obtain a court order before they can get it for an investigation, and your jealous spouse can't get it from the wireless company at all. Cell companies have been tracking this triangulation information for their own purposes for years. Of course, the fact that this data exists somewhere is nothing new. This is why my trip to Hong Kong wasn't logged (because I had all cell connections turned off while GPS was on), but my stop-over in Tokyo Narita on the same trip was logged (I had turned on my phone to make a quick call, but did not use GPS).
#Gps tracks apple store install
(Nitpickers will point out that you do give your consent to iTunes when you download and install iOS 4, but this is not treated the same way as the consent given to the iPhone every time an app wants to use GPS.) So, whether or not you're using GPS, if you're using your iPhone as a cell phone, you are being tracked and logged constantly without your knowledge. Users don't get to decide whether their locations are tracked via cell towers or not-unlike GPS, there is no setting that lets users turn it off, there's no explicit consent every time it happens, and there's no way to block the logging. "In some cases it can get very confused and temporarily think you’re several miles from your actual location, but these tend to be intermittent glitches." This isn’t as accurate as GPS, but presumably takes less power," they wrote. "As far as we can tell, the location is determined by triangulating against the nearest cell-phone towers. AdvertisementĪllan and Warden point out in their iPhone Tracker FAQ that this is indeed the method Apple is using in the consolidated.db file, and this is also the reason users might see strange iPhone Tracker dots in places they haven't been. Apple also triangulates your location from cell phone towers and logs that information in order to help get a faster GPS lock (or to find your location without GPS if you're getting bad GPS signal). However, that's not all that's going on behind the scenes. The company makes sure to notify you on your iPhone or iPad every time you use an app that will grab your GPS location so that you're always informed of when you're being tracked. Court order required-or notįrom the end-user point of view, Apple only does one kind of location tracking, and it happens via GPS. But if I know I used GPS in Hong Kong in order to make geotagged tweets and photos, shouldn't it show up in this log file? The answer is no, and the reason behind it should scare you. Why? Because I left my iPhone's cellular and data connections turned off and only used GPS with WiFi while I was there. What's not shown is a week-long trip I took to Hong Kong in October. Slightly more zoomed in look at my whereabouts
I also fly to New York City and San Francisco, and I have a few dots at the Tokyo Narita airport when I traveled through there in October. You can see that I seem to spend most of my time in Chicago and occasionally the suburbs, with road trips down to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Springfield, and Wichita.
For example, my log appears to start on J(one day before the launch of the iPhone 4) and shows nearly every trip I've ever taken since then and when. In order to drive the point home, the two developed an open source application called iPhone Tracker that lets anyone with access to your computer see where you've been. The data collection appears to be associated with the launch of iOS 4 last June, meaning that many users (us at Ars included) have nearly a year's worth of stalking data collected. The two discovered that the iPhone or 3G iPad-anything with 3G data access, so no iPod touch-are logging location data to a file called consolidated.db with latitude and longitude coodinates and a timestamp.
Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden revealed their findings on Wednesday ahead of their presentation at the Where 2.0 conference taking place in San Francisco. And it's information that no one should have access to-not even law enforcement, barring a court order.
#Gps tracks apple store mac
The information comes from a location cache file found within your iPhone's backups on your Mac or PC, bringing out serious privacy concerns and opening the door for a jealous spouse, thief, or even a crafty trojan to take a detailed look at your whereabouts. Two security researchers have discovered a simple way to map out where you've been almost anywhere in the world-without any hacking involved. If you haven't yet enabled encrypted backups for your iPhone or iPad, now's definitely the time to start.
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