Holy crap. This is for real. I just ran the software and found the secret file on my laptop, detailing where I've been over the past year, including lots of details of where I visited in Vegas last year during the Netroots Nation conference, where I've been to in DC, and Chicago. It even shows you, over time, where I've been. Watch the video below I made of the data using the software I link to above. It show where I've traveled, and when I traveled, and how much. It gets a lot more detailed, in terms of location, I'm showing you the general view.
And it's actually much worse than the video shows. The guys who uncovered this, and who made it possible for you to see your own data, have washed the data slightly - it's FAR more detailed than my video shows below:
To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately.
A detailed record, second by second, of everywhere you have been over the past year. And anyone with an iPhone knows that the damn phone knows where you are within a few feet. It seems they're only using cell tower data, rather than GPS data, but still, that data is pretty accurate if you're in a big city.
Interestingly, the data does not include my iPhone usage in Europe, where I use an old iPhone with a French sim card. Possibly they need American towers, or AT&T, to track me (also, this is likely illegal in Europe). This is pretty despicable. UPDATE: Another reader ran the software on his phone and it DID in fact track his location in Europe. Interesting question as to whether this was even legal.
Here's more from the folks who discovered it - this has Homeland Security written all over it.
Peter Warden and Alasdair Allan revealed their findings on Wednesday, in which they discovered that both the iPhone and 3G iPad are "regularly recording the position" of the device and saving them in a hidden file. The data is restored through iTunes with backups, and even across device migrations.And don't forget, AT&T, which had a monopoly on the iPhone just until a few months ago, is reportedly in cahoots with the NSA:
The researchers have concluded that Apple's collection of the data is "intentional," and contacted the company's product security team in an effort to find out the company's reasoning. They did not receive a response.
"What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device," Allan wrote. "It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands. Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released."
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
