Don't attack people!
Don't respond to the Anti-Apple Thread Trolls!
PLEASE IGNORE THEM!!!
Is Apple Tracking you? Ping!
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Rush is talking about this now...
Yesterday I was driving home with my daughter who does have a iPhone. So she starts up some app that gives her traffic reports. This was around 4PM heading north on I95 toward Baltimore. Traffic was slow. Should I switch to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway? Which Tunnel should I take? My daughter is giving me reports. So I asked, "How do they get these reports? How do we know it wasn't from some guy flying in a helicopter at lunch time?
I found out. I think. The thing was so d*mn accurate almost to the foot where traffic started to begin moving at normal speed. The only way they could possibly do this is by taking position signals from all the iPhones and seeing how fast they are moving. I think.
ML/NJ
Well, there’s a good reason to track recent locations in the phone — the “where’s my phone” feature that lets you find where your phone got to if/when it gets lost. No idea what justification exists for keeping anything more than recent locations, though.
My best buddy in that department is an antique from Virgin Mobile that has been through more crap than Ed Norton, and still does everything its maker intended. Which does not include GPS or even photography. It has survived being splattered on the highway, and a full cycle in the laundry. It is likely immortal. Cost: $7. per month.
Normally your location data is stored on the provider’s servers. The service provider needs to know where you are so they can connect you to the nearest cell tower. I hear it checks your location and makes a log record every 7 seconds.
Apple is just saving money by having the users keep the log.
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ANY cell phone can be tracked. Whether the data is stored at the cell phone company or on the device is pretty much immaterial.
I haven’t even been anywhere. Perhaps I should go somewhere. Oh, wait, I don’t have an Iphone...
I alerted him to what I'd found and that he should turn off the GPS. There are instructions somewhere how to do it, but I don't know if it disables what is stored in the phone's memory and if such stored information can be transferred to your computer.
The purpose might be benign, in part. You hear of people being lost and can make a call phone call with batteries going low. It takes time to track there location from a call, assuming there is a tower close enough to pick up the signal, and maybe the GPS coordinates make it easier. But like any good thing, bad things can often result from it.
People have been victimized by criminals taking advantage of the info in photos and other information I just posted on places like Facebook and Craig's list.
I usually save in a manner that will preserve my exif data, but if I had an iPhone, I would either turn it off or save it in a manner that strips off the exif. I think some photo hosting sites strip it off anyway like maybe Flickr.
FYI all phones and computers, etc.. do this. It’s not just Apple.
There are two tables: one for WiFi access points, and one for cell phone towers.
Your iPhone is simply keeping a cache of transmitters that it "hears". Each time it hears a new one, it queries an online database and gets the location. It stores this data, so that it can be used again without making another query to the online database.
The iPhone has "assisted GPS", which means that it uses the known locations of WiFi access points and cell towers to approximate your position, then uses GPS to refine it. Using this method, it can determine your position much faster, anytime you use an iPhone application that utilizes "location services".
Yes, the Wifi data can be used to approximately determine your position within a city block, after the fact. But, it's not logging the location of YOUR phone -- it's remembering the locations of fixed points that were used to help determine your location.
The cell phone tower data is much less precise. I've seen it report a location miles away from the closest place I've been (driving on a major interstate highway through the area).
Apple should come out with an app, iED, and make it free to AlQaeda then give that information real time to our air force.
;)
/lib/modules/6.6.6-bho
http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/#faq
The link above will tell you how to find and look at this data. The phone is recording the location of the cellphone *and* the location of all WiFi access points the phone encounters.
This hidden file is nether new nor secret. It’s just moved. Location services have been available to the Apple device for some time. Understand what this file is — log generated by the various radios and sensors located within the device. This file is utilized by several operations on the device that actually is what makes this device pretty “smart”.
Through my work with various law enforcement agencies, we’ve used h-cells.plist on devices older than iOS 4 to harvest geolocational evidence from iOS devices.
Levinson declined to divulge the names of those agencies, but told the reporter that he had worked with “multiple state and federal agencies both in the U.S. and internationally”.