Your iPhone is recording everywhere you go

[Randy_Seltzer]

@quixotic78

It’s a non sequitur because the word “MobileMe” does not appear in the thread linked from the OP. This is a different beast. You might as well be talking about World of Warcraft, for all the bearing it has on this discussion. You can assert, if you’d like, that this newly revealed functionality is the same as MobileMe, but you’d appear to be wrong.

I was responding to your post. Post 4. You might want to go back and read what you wrote. Specifically what you quoted and agreed with.

[Ferret_Herder]

@Sehmket

All we can do, however, is help you set up Find My iPhone/ iPad/ iPod on MobileMe before you misplace your phone.

Could you? I installed the Find My iPhone app on my iPhone 4 and… I don’t know now. I think there’s a way to do it without MobileMe, from what I was reading?

[Boyo_Jim]

@Sehmket

…One thing I CAN promise folks - there is no tool that exists to let the tech support folks track the phones…

Of COURSE the grunts like you don’t know about it. That app is reserved for Steve Jobs, the CIA, the Illuminati, and the Washington Papal Nuncio.

[quixotic78]

@Randy_Seltzer

I was responding to your post. Post 4. You might want to go back and read what you wrote. Specifically what you quoted and agreed with.

Dude, give it a rest. I didn’t say one word about MobileMe, something I’ve never even heard of before today. You clearly didn’t bother reading the OP, and so you went off on a defensive tangent about something… well, tangential. It happens. Man up and move on (or, if you’d prefer, weigh in on the OP).

[Randy_Seltzer]

@quixotic78

Dude, give it a rest. I didn’t say one word about MobileMe, something I’ve never even heard of before today. You clearly didn’t bother reading the OP, and so you went off on a defensive tangent about something… well, tangential. It happens. Man up and move on (or, if you’d prefer, weigh in on the OP).

quixotic78 = class act.

[sevenwood]

@MsWhatsit

This is the #1 reason that a friend of mine refuses to get a smartphone. “Then they’ll know where you are at all times!”

If you want to freak him out, just mention that the phone company knows where he is at all times even if he’s just walking around with a dumb cellphone. The phone company always knows which cell tower he’s closest to so that it can transmit incoming calls to his phone through that tower.

Here’s proof. While you’re talking to him, dial his cellphone number. His cellphone will ring! HE’S DOOMED!!!

[Sehmket]

@Ferret_Herder

Could you? I installed the Find My iPhone app on my iPhone 4 and… I don’t know now. I think there’s a way to do it without MobileMe, from what I was reading?

You’ll want to read this article, which explains everything: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4436

The goofy part of it is that you still have to go to me.com and log in using your AppleID (the same thing you use to log in to iTunes), even if you don’t have a MobileMe account.

[Garfield226]

@pulykamell

Hmm, peeking through the actual database, it appears that the file is around 25 MB. So far as I can tell, there’s almost 16,000 location data points since June 24, 2010.

ETA: It’s a bit unclear to me what this means, exactly, as there’s sometimes a hundred rows in the database with exactly the same timestamp.

Yeah, I’m a bit confused about this too. I’ve got 10,000-ish, and the same lots-of-same-timestamped locations.

My cursory look shows my data appears to not duplicate any latitude/longitude pairs. You’d think that if I spend most of my time hanging around my home and work, and it was tracking me, that there’d be at least some duplicates, right?

I’ve also noticed that when I go on trips or someplace I’ve never been before, the number of points logged goes way up, compared with just driving around town. That would seem to indicate that it’s not interested in tracking every time you move, or at a given interval of time, but only when you move somewhere new.

My working theory, based partly on a blog post I read that suggests it’s caching cell tower locations so it doesn’t need to get them from an outside source, is that the phone is collecting locations, not tracking them. When you go someplace new, the phone figures out where it is, maybe what tower is best, and logs it. Maybe it checks again each time you’re in that place and if it finds a better tower it makes a new entry for that long/lat and deletes the old one. If it doesn’t find a better tower, it leaves the old entry alone.

I’m not sure how to explain the duplicate timestamps – maybe the precision of the datestamp isn’t good (though then you’d expect the intervals to be regular, I think, and they aren’t, near as I can tell), maybe it has something to do with battery life or syncing the phone.

Frankly, I was disappointed that the data wasn’t (or doesn’t seem to be, at least) a minute-by-minute track of where the phone was, even if it was only accurate to a mile or so. I thought that would be awesome to have.

[guizot]

@Baron_Greenback

Are you sure about this? Seems unlikely that an Android default would be to upload to Photobucket rather than Picasa. Also, I’ve used Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3, and that isn’t anything like the default photo behaviour. What version you on?

2.1, and I don’t remember how it got switched on, to be honest. I probably did it inadvertently, and just didn’t bother to change it. And I don’t know why Photobuck; I’d prefer Picasa, actually. And of course, it alerts a notification when it does the upload.

[QUOTE=sevenwood]
If you want to freak him out, just mention that the phone company knows where he is at all times even if he’s just walking around with a dumb cellphone. The phone company always knows which cell tower he’s closest to so that it can transmit incoming calls to his phone through that tower.
[/quote]
Yeah, this particular point isn’t news at all. A long while ago it was a minor privacy issue somehow, but no one really cared. Just turn off your phone, or use a walkie-talkie.

The phone companies can’t turn over the data to third parties except by court order. But as far as the technology goes, it isn’t necessary to keep a record anyway, is it? They just need to know where the phone is a any given moment, right?

[xash]

Read this for further clarification:

Apple is not “recording your moves”
http://www.willclarke.net/?p=247

[Ferret_Herder]

@Sehmket

You’ll want to read this article, which explains everything: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4436

The goofy part of it is that you still have to go to me.com and log in using your AppleID (the same thing you use to log in to iTunes), even if you don’t have a MobileMe account.

Excellent, thanks!

[sandra_nz]

I didn’t read the terms and conditions where it told me it would do this so I don’t really feel I can be justifiably outraged. And, frankly, I just don’t care if they record where my phone is. I’m pretty sure Google follows me everywhere I go on the internet and I don’t care about that either. Maybe I’m just too happy in my safe little world, I don’t know. I just can’t see anything bad coming out of this.

[Ferret_Herder]

@xash

Read this for further clarification:

Apple is not “recording your moves”
http://www.willclarke.net/?p=247

Looks like it got slashdotted.

[Crotalus]

@xash

Read this for further clarification:

Apple is not “recording your moves”
http://www.willclarke.net/?p=247

Apparently that site has attracted some unplanned-for traffic.
[QUOTE=The linked site]
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
[/QUOTE]

[BigT]

@Crotalus

Apparently that site has attracted some unplanned-for traffic.

Well, then, since I can read it, here’s the portion I would feel comfortable quoting:

I don’t mean to denigrate the work they’ve done. Nor do I mean to imply that there aren’t security concerns with this file. But after looking at the raw data that the iPhone stores, I want to point out that it seems that they are technically incorrect. Apple is not storing the device’s location, it’s storing the location of the towers that the device is communicating with.

What I found was disappointing. Almost all the points were way off. […] The only thing that makes sense is that the iPhone is actually storing the locations of the cell phone towers that it communicates with. My guess is that the iPhone uses this data to help it locate cell towers if it is in the same location again in the future.

[Hennessy]

I don’t know what the negative outcomes of this could be but I would be very paranoid if there were a way to access information telling everywhere I’ve been. That is unacceptable

[beowulff]

@Hennessy

I don’t know what the negative outcomes of this could be but I would be very paranoid if there were a way to access information telling everywhere I’ve been. That is unacceptable

You’re already paranoid.

[guizot]

WSJ says that Google is doing it too. They describe it like this:
[QUOTE=Wall Street Journal]
Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services—expected to rise to $8.3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

In the case of Google, according to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar, an HTC Android phone collected its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least several times an hour. It also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any nearby Wi-Fi networks, as well as a unique phone identifier.
[/quote]

[Hennessy]

I was born paranoid but this technology stuff isn’t helping

[Electric_Warrior]

This seems really useful in the case that someone steals my phone and I need to find it. It seems more probable that someone would lose a mobile device than a computer, and in that case I’d want to know the location of the phone. Although, it’s less helpful if it isn’t precise. [EDIT: and also if I can’t access the data until I connect my phone to my computer, heh.]

Then again, if I get a smart phone I’ll probably just run Google Latitude on it. My thirst for data has greatly overcome any paranoia I might have about people knowing my location.