iPhone knows where you live

iPhone tracker

OMG! This fascinating and scary at the same time.

It will not surprise you that your iPhone at all times know where you are. Therefore has it after all GPS equipment on board and may also determine its location by the proximity of mobile measuring poles. But did you know that the data is being preserved? Two British researchers came to this discovery when they were working on a visualization of mobile data.

In an iTunes backup their own iPhone, the British found a file with all location data that the iPhone had gained so far. The file is automatically updated when the iPhone is synced with iTunes.

According to the researchers, the file is not a direct threat because the data is not used by Apple and only through your own backup available. At the same time there is talk of potential danger because the file is not encrypted and can be read easily. For this contention, they put themselves to the iPhone tracker utility (OS X only) that you just made the entire geographical history of you and your iPhone signal strength display.

source: www.onemorething.nl

Update – May 1, 2011: official Q&A of Apple about ‘locationgate’.

Update – May 4, 2011: Apple releases iOS 4.3.3 Software Update. This update contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache including:

• Reduces the size of the cache
• No longer backs the cache up to iTunes
• Deletes the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off