iSpy: Apple File Tracks iPhone User’s Location

Written by Pat's Papers | Thursday, 21 April 2011 7:17 AM

iSpy. That’s what the San Jose Mercury News calls the discovery, made public yesterday by two researchers, that Apple is keeping tabs on its users. The researchers found a file that records your location on all devices running Apple’s iOS operating system (iPads, iPhones, Ipods) and on computers used to sync iOS devices. The file, which is unencrypted, is used to record the time and place a device was used. Experts say it’s not clear why the information was being harvested, and that there are both “good and ill” ways to use such data. It’s also unclear whether Apple can access the data. One of the researchers who made the discovery, however, was not so optimistic: “I love Apple. I worked there for five years. I was just pretty sad when I discovered that this was how they were handling my location data. It just bummed me out, really.”

The researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, wrote a blog post summarizing their findings, which were presented at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. They also plotted what the iPhone location data looks like: