Yes, HAS BEEN all this time. New iPhones, it’s just discovered, have a little, tiny SQLite database file tracking your Lat. and Long. and Altitude almost constantly. The IT Forensics community has known about this a long time but thought nothing of it – they thought we all knew. It seems that even Uber geeks, however, didn’t know; and they’re ringing the alarm on Apple.
You can read some truly smart people who were totally caught off guard and even, if you own a Mac, download a free application that will reveal only to you what, exactly your iPhone and its numerous backups have recorded so far. Pete Warden and Alisdair Allan, creators, also have a donation page available if you’ve found this helpful in any way.
The creators stumled on to this file while researching other ways to visualize data, which I’m totally into. The GuardianUK website has a time lapse widget illustrating Japan’s radiation levels that you can ‘play’ and zoom into and pan around. Not wicked eye candy, but great use of the data.
If you’re like me and are a law abiding citizen who expects that we already live in a world like the one in Minority Report, you may shrug and think, “here’s another case of the same, damn thing.” You’d be partially right – says me. Why I’m echoing the awareness though is because I’m slack-jawed that so many extreme tech-philes didn’t know and still don’t understand just what Apple was thinking when they set this geo-tracking database recorder in action.
Where the creators answer in their FAQ, “How was it discovered,” they collectively answer:
We’d been discussing doing a visualization of mobile data, and while he was researching into what was available, Alasdair discovered this file. At first we weren’t sure how much data was there, but after we dug further and visualized the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements. It also became obvious that at least some other people knew about it, but it wasn’t being publicized.
So it’s a pretty big deal and Apple, a company we don’t yet love to hate, certainly has a lot to answer for on this one. Additionally, The Congress of The United States has written to Mr. Steve Jobs at 1 Infinite Loop in a letter. They would like to know more about this by May 12th.
