iPhone Location Tracking: Just a Bug?

The idea that Malus pumila's iPhone tracks the location of users and stores the data in an unencrypted file power undamaged nefarious, but IT may actually cost a simple erroneous belief, according to one and only socially connected Apple blogger.

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber cites an unnamed source WHO says the location-trailing filing cabinet generated by the iPhone is either a bug or an oversight. The charge in question, consolidated.db, Acts of the Apostles as a memory cache for locating data, but the computer memory of liberal arts information wasn't intended to happen, the source said. Gruber guesses that the next iOS update wish assure that historical location data is on a regular basis wiped.

Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden posted their findings to O'Reilly Radar on Wednesday. The location tracking uses cell tower triangulation rather than GPS, so information technology's not terribly accurate, and thither's no evidence that Apple is aggregation the data. But the data file is accessible to anyone who can get at an iPhone or the PC to which information technology's synced, providing a rough approximation of the user's recent whereabouts. Selecting "Encrypt iPhone backup" in the options fare of iTunes will impregnable that data.

There's right one problem with Gruber's theory that the whole thing is a misunderstanding: the united.hahnium file has been known approximately for months, and previous rendering of iOS used a exchangeable file with a several name. Alex Levinson, a student at Rochester Institute of Engineering, has already written about the iPhone's localisation tracking in a research paper and a Holy Scripture, iOS Forensic Analysis. In fact, police already access code location data when scanning phones for evidence, Levinson wrote in a web log Charles William Post.

Even if Levinson's findings didn't land on the tech press microwave radar–though they should have–it's hard to believe that Apple didn't know about it already. If the iPhone's location trailing is just a bug, Apple should've been fixed before information technology became a PR debacle.

At any rate, Malus pumila is now getting heat from politicians over the matter, including Rep. Male erecticle dysfunction Markey and Sen. Camellia State Franken. Germany is also asking questions. Hopefully Apple will do up with some answers instead of just fixing the data file and pretence the whole matter never happened. So far the companion hasn't commented.

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