Posted on 04/20/2011 8:52:34 AM PDT by rivercat
Your iPhone is keeping a record of everywhere you've been since June. This data is stored on your phone (or iPad) and computer, easily available to anyone who gets their hands on it. Why? Apple won't say. We're creeped out.
The enormous privacy startle, apparently enabled by this summer's iOS 4 release, was discovered by two security researchers, one of whom claims he was an Apple employee for five years. They're equally puzzled and disturbed by the location collection: "By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements," they explain. All it would take to crack the information out of your iOS device is an easy jailbreak. On your computer, the information can be opened as easily as JPEG.
The data itself is jarringly accurate. Even though it appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing (meaning you're not safe with location services switched off), the map I was able to generate with mapping software the security duo released visualizes my life since the day I bought my iPhone 4 in July. Everywhere I've been. Bus trips home. Train trips to visit family. Vacations. Places I'd forgotten I'd even gone. Zoom in on that giant blotch over New York, and you can see my travels, block by block. My entire personal and professional life—documented by a phone I didn't know was also a tracking device. It's all accessible—where I've been, and when. I don't want this information bouncing around in my pocket with me. Do you?
The article says it goes by towers, not GPS.
Rush addressed this on his show today, according to his sources, Android does not do this.
Nailed it nearly perfectly. It's easier to look up the coordinates now, just go to google maps, maps.google.com and enter the coordinates as N xxx xxx W xxx xxx, don't have to mess with minuses and extra converter pages. But it took me a bit to get it.
See, he sent it to me from the restaurant directly from his iPhone, no access to a computer (probably has a laptop and left it at the hotel). He bought Paint Shop Pro, and I don't think he ever bothered to learn how it works. He's not interested in getting a better camera or photography. He sent me a nice shot of a hawk from a cam I helped him pick out and don't think he ever bothers with that any more. I tried to talk him into a Nikon dslr sitting there, he could well afford it, didn't want to bother with it so picked a P&S instead.
Yeah, I know exif, have used it a lot for my own and to see the exposure, etc., other photogs post if they haven't stripped it off. Most news photos it's not on there.
I like my own photo system I devised better and am finding iPhoto a nuisance. Lightroom is the same way. I need to tweak my file system and stick in a few tags in a text editor right after I've dl'ed them from my camera. Clumsy maybe, but I'm so used to it.
this is more than just the signal locator.
This is about intentionally created a SECRET data file which is unique to the activities of a single user.
If the exif can be stripped, then it can also be edited, seems like a way to establish false data.
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).
Not secret, if we know about it. Downloaded the app that drew a map of my locations, I haven’t been anywhere:-)
I am pretty sure we are not alone in this data tracking.
Yes, I changed the date from April 6 to April 7, checked it against my exif reader, and it read out everything right except the date, had an 07 instead of 06. There were two places for it, so I changed both, then used find to see if I could find the same pattern again and couldn't. I was also able to see EXIF.
If I fooled around with it more, I might be able to pick out and change the other numbers. Will work on it, I like challenges, some other time.
Fear not. Let Apple, AT&T, GE and Google know everything about you and your family. They will take care of you.
Makes one wonder....
I agree. Not to worry.
I just wanted to get the facts out that regardless of whether or not your *device* keeps a detailed location log, the network does, on a device-specific EMEI number basis.
The networks MUST do that so you can be and remain authorized to send and receive calls and data as you move around.
Now I can fix that second date by changing the date on my computer. I'm not completely used to this mac yet so don't want to change too much like I could easily with Windows.
If I open it and just save it again under yet a different name, it changes all the dates to today. but preserved the rest of the exif.
I see how you can easily clean off the exif on this mac. Er no, I can't. There is a check in the box for exif when I go to save it. If I uncheck it and save under yet another name, all it does is change the orientation, preserves all the other original EXIF info. I thought you maybe could strip it off that way, but you still need a photo editor. iPhoto might do it or I could tinker around with various formats just using find, double clicking on the thumbnail and resaving in the various formats, then checking for exif. .bmp used to strip it off, also .tiff Ithink, but may preserve it now. That's one problem I've had making an album using some photos I saved in .bmp (.tiff takes up huge memory) and moving them over to the mac, exif is gone. So I go back to the original which I always preserve unedited and get it that way.
So an exif stripper might be more intuitive and useful for my son, but I have no need for one.
Open the photo and do a screen capture, or use Preview to grab a screen window, or selection. That should strip everything, but that is cheating, and the point was that fake location data could be put in the file.
Apple should come out with an app, iED, and make it free to AlQaeda then give that information real time to our air force.
;)
Have you ever read Churchill’s “History of English Speaking Peoples”? I really liked what he had to say about King Arthur. In short, he chooses to believe that Arthur existed as a real human being and was not merely myth, because to believe so was more pleasant than not to.
/lib/modules/6.6.6-bho
I'm still puzzling over the other problem. These are 1.5 meg files. Huge. Then I think I'm fighting compression.
I tried to find the picture size, didn't work. Converted to hex from the file info (which also reads the basic exif but not the GPS coordinates), that didn't work. The rest of it is in some crazy code and symbols.
I know I can alter the date and time, mfr, device name, version (unless it gets munged or doesn't match the same # of characters), then it's too much for me.
Linie after line after line of gibberish to wade through. I'd really like to find those GPS coordinates, have to be in there somewhere as well as all the rest I want. There's probably a program to convert it, looked but didn't see anything that looked like it would work for me.
I deleted most of the data hoping to isolate the exif and get another readout, but I destroyed too much data to do anything with it.
If I copy and paste the date and time part into my post here, it comes out wrong. The only thing to do would be a screen capture and upload it which I'm not in a mood to do. Plus it's copyrighted by Hewlett Packard. I saw that much lol.
I love fooling around with stuff like this. Few years back I hid a message in a graphic. Only two people out of I don't know how many in that group figured that one out, and I made it pretty obvious where to start with it, just not how to read it. All I did was make a talk balloon with a white background, then changed to text and changed the white to one step down on the three hex color codes. Visually it was impossible to detect, but there were a couple different ways to process it to make it readable.
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