Your iPhone tracks where you've been.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13145562

Your iPhone will create a GPS tagged crumb trail, upload this file to your PC when you perform a sync and then transfer to your previous where abouts back to Apple Inc via your Internet connection. All without your knowledge or authority.

Just read that on the engadget site
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/20/researchers-find-ios-4-records-your-location-in-system-file-syn/

Why is it that these companies insist on "tracking" its users and then hide behind the "Terms & Conditions" ?

Not sure if this uploads in any sort of real time which could be useful for finding lost friends/family members etc

Um, the linked article says "no suggestion that [Apple] has been uploading or using the information."

According to some reports, it is a cache of cell tower locations, used internally by the device either to speed up acquisition of GPS lock, or else provide location-based services in the absence of GPS. Storing the data on the device avoids network traffic, and incidentally gives Apple less information than if it asked their servers every time.

I'm not yet sure which reports to believe. A key question is whether it accumulates multiple entries per cell tower; some reports say it doesn't, and that new entries overwrite old ones. It does seem like the researchers who announced this and got the recent publicity, didn't do due diligence because it was already well-known. There have even been books published about it.

And it does sound like Apple don't have any sinister motivation. The data is on your phone and they don't get to see it. (It may still be a security risk, though.)

having read a few articles on this, I tend to lean towards the dumb luck crowd rather than nefarious black helicopter crowd. Apparently, from what I understand, it was created for (future) use on app advertising and now for mobile online searches. Whether this is an intended consequence or not, for the last few weeks (before the articles) I noticed that my iphone searches came back with more local reference than simply web based searches.

I understand that they need your coordinates to provide location based services and advertising but that doesn't explain why they would capture that data and store it long term on the device or transfer it back to your computer. It would probably be more efficient for the phone to close that file and start a new one periodically.

The article I read reported that the archive was being copied from your phone to your computer. This would seem to be pointless unless they want to use or sell that data later for whatever purpose they deem appropriate. The fact that the data isn't even encrypted just pushes the weird factor for me a bit.

Perhaps Jobs has forgotten about this. or perhaps he hasn't

Maybe the bread crumb trail data is for the next Apple device called iRover.

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2011/04/oh_we_know_where_were_going.php

I assume the phone companies have been tracking this information since the dawn of cell phones; they only news about the iPhone is that data is in a file accessible on the device itself...

For performance. If the mapping from cell tower ID to location is stored locally on the phone, the phone can determine your location without needing a network transaction. It saves time, and power, and data costs, and works even when the network is not available. And it is actually better for privacy than continually talking to Apple's servers.

Microsoft's phones have a similar system, but they do talk to the servers each time. Android phones have a similar system, and they do have an on-phone cache, but they limit its size a bit better.

? It's a database.

When Apple revamped their location services API, the database got moved into a more public folder (on the phone), and it happens to be one that the backup system includes. The backup system doesn't list each file that needs to be backed up, it takes everything below certain folders.

Copying the data from your phone to your computer doesn't enable them to sell it.

It suggests they weren't thinking about privacy, or indeed trying to hide what they were doing.

Unfortunately my confidence in a corporation to do the right thing by NOT doing something that is legal and worth money dwindles daily.

One case in point is TomTom selling speed data to police. I understand that TomTom could clean the data (if needed) in order to make it impossible to track back to an individual. I also suspect that a significant percentage of TomTom users are surprised that this data was even captured, let alone reported back to TomTom and eventually sold. I'm not part of the black helicopter crowd but it just doesn't seem like an honest way to do business in my old fashioned opinion.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/226527/TomTom_Caught_Selling_Speed_Data_to_Dutch_Police.html

I have a suspicion, backed by NO information whatsoever, that this data storage may have been required by the FBI or some other law enforcement agency.

When I was working for a telephone manufacturer making computer connected phones, I found out some things that I did not know about the phone system. For example, the 3x4 keypad layout on our telephones is actually three-quarters of a 4x4 key layout. I was told that the other four keys are (in part) reserved for FBI/law enforcement use.

Actually the original use of the additional keys on the ATT phone network was for special features and network management, think back to the old days of operators and manual call routing. On some networks the keys were used to enable specific features which are now accessed through different mechanisms like *67 to suppress caller ID. Some organizations (like the US Military) had dedicated communication links (often also managed by ATT) and used the additional keys to set priorities on calls. All of this is documented in various histories of the US phone system. A decent summary can be found on Wikipedia.

Technology doesn't develop in clean simple ways. There are always dead ends, obsolete bits and occasional oopses along the way. Assuming the worst may be safe (or at least good clean fun paranoia) but there are practical limits and sometimes it is better to attribute things to "stuff happens" and oops than nefarious reasons.

-Eric

I gather it is a feature of those devices that they give live reports on traffic congestion by spotting when users get stuck in traffic. Obviously that involves feeding data back to TomTom.

The police weren't using the data to prosecute individuals. They used it to help decide where speed cameras were most needed.

I'm sure there is at least one Apple engineer who saw this as an opportunity to get highly valuable information. If not, Apple needs to hire better talent.

I am very happy to have this feature, and I love the fact that my mobile phone tracks its location constantly.

I also love the fact that it retains these positions, and allows me to geo-tag my photos and videos, automatically geo-tag my notes and more. It makes it easier for me to do my job, to manage my personal media and to do things I never could before, like immediately locate a friend's iPhone when she lost it Sunday (we used the "find my iphone" tool and found it next to a driveway in the deep grass).

In my experience, people seem to have this sense that they are individually important to larger entities, such as governments and corporations. Most of us - myself included - mean nothing other than "market share" to companies that would track your location. There's no deep secrets here - 99.99% of location tracking is about selling stuff to people.

I remind people that there are plenty of other things that track your behavior and your location:

- Credit Cards: your geo-transactional profile is used for fraud detection analysis.

- Vehicles: All "EZ Pass" and "Fast Pass" tags are used not only for toll collection but also to monitor and report on traffic flow (how do you think they create those real-time "travel time" signs and flow-rate maps you see on the news?")

- GPS Devices: Many GPS devices record your position and report in the aggregate routes and travel speeds that makers of these devices aggregate and sell.

- Grocery stores: If you use a "bonus card" every last thing you buy is tracked. If you are a woman, they can (and do) use this data to determine your menstrual cycle and create coupons accordingly. If you shop in more than one store, they can (and do) determine your work ours and even profession. See also "Credit cards".

- Car Radios: If you have a car radio, and you turn it on, there are places (parking garages mostly) that have sensors that can determine what station you are listening to (It's done with the IF frequency re-radiation). This data is collected and sold to the media business.

- Set-Top Boxes for televisions: Every show you watch, every commercial you skip (if you have a DVR) is tracked and data about that information is sold to various companies.

- In any urban environment, you are photographed or video recordings are made of you 2,000 to 3,000 times A DAY. If you are in a more rural area, this number drops, but if you go into a store, buy gas, use a bank you are DEFINITELY being video recorded.

We are a connected society - and like a small town, it's very hard to pass through unnoticed. While there will always be a way - and need - to be "anonymous" - it has always taken more effort to be in a society and invisible to it.

The history of opposing "location tracking" goes back centuries. When house numbers were first proposed, back in France in 1512, there was an uproar, because it would be a "violation of privacy". The same goes for zip codes, UPC codes - whatever identifiers are attached to you and your property - have always been opposed as intrusive - until the potential for intrusive is outweighed by the benefits you get individually and as a society.

Remember - for each of these advances, you can opt-out, and it does not necessarily mean living in a plywood box Ted Kaczynski style. The Amish do rather well (even though they use GPS-guided diesel tractors driven by "the English" for them)and there are some lovely "off the grid" communities scattered throughout the world.

But if you want your economic standard of living to sustain the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed, you can't have it both ways. You don't want to be tracked by a mobile phone? (and ALL mobile phones smart or not can and do track you location) Well guess what, the location of the phone is essential to how they work - so if you don't like it, don't get one.

Your phone's camera can geo tag photos (and other things) without needing to keep the history your location, it just turns the GPS on and gets the location then saves it in the picture then turns it back off. Unless your saving the logs to later tag pictures from another device.
That being said I utilize Google latitude and have turned on its tracking (thats how I found out how innacurate the aGPS location is). I've kept track of things I do for many years in a calendar and now I can take the data from Latitude to make things a little easier.

How to dissapear from the American Total Information Awareness Grid.

BTW you also forgot about the domestic Electric Smart Meter grid, which considering the installation cost makes no sense what so ever considering the infrastructure costs would be much more cost effective in hardening the electrical grid supply against a 'Carrington' Event type solar storm.

After researching the electrical grid domestic Smart meter and its proponents from the military industrial complex (the main proponents are BAe and Lockheed Martin) the conclusion I have come to actually begin to concur with the thinking of Alex Jones located at the heart of FEMA region 6.

Folks are sleep walking down a very slippery slope.

Even in the UK it is illegal under the data protection act to pass personal information to a US jurisdiction due to the abuses of personal data information that occur and the fact in the US there is no legislation protecting data and information rights of individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998