Researchers Discover that Your iPhone Tracks You

As far as smartphones go, the iPhone is without a doubt, an incredible product. It allows its users to easily research data, watch movies, listen to music, and take advantage of the billion apps that exist in Apple’s App Store. In some cases, it might seem like the iPhone is the perfect device, but is it? If you’re at all a fan of privacy, then according to a couple of researchers, it’s not.

According to researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, iPhone users using iOS 4 have all of their location data stored right inside their phone, and even on their PC or Mac if the phone has ever been synced with iTunes. For some reason, a database file called consolidated.db is kept in the root of the iPhone, and when accessed, reveals nearly every place you’ve ever been with the phone. This sounds almost unbelievable, but believe it.

The researchers have even gone as far as to release an application that allows you to read the totally unencrypted file that would have been backed up with iTunes, and the data just might surprise you. Were you some place you shouldn’t have been? You might want to grab some thermite and burn both your computer and phone.

Alright… that might be a little extreme, but there is a reason for alarm here. You might not truly care if people know where you’ve been, but the invasion of privacy is huge, especially since with the proper tool, anyone with access to your PC can view very detailed information about your whereabouts. Jealous spouse? Time for an account password!

The biggest deal about all this is that Apple didn’t tell its users that this kind of practice was going on, and worse still, there doesn’t seem to be any way to purge the data, either (I couldn’t find out if a full phone reset would accomplish the job or not). Hopefully Apple will speak up about the issue and then release a tool to do so, and explain what the reason for the file is.

What do you guys think about this? Would you be offended if you found out your phone kept track of literally every location you’ve ever been?

In order to drive the point home, the two developed an open source application called iPhone Tracker that lets anyone with access to your computer see where you’ve been. For example, my log appears to start on June 23, 2010 (one day before the launch of the iPhone 4) and shows nearly every trip I’ve ever taken since then and when. You can see that I seem to spend most of my time in Chicago and occasionally the suburbs, with road trips down to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Springfield, and Wichita. I also fly to New York City and San Francisco, and I have a few dots at the Tokyo Narita airport when I traveled through there in October.