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twesterm on 20 April 2011
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Rath said:
twesterm said:
Rath said:
Garnett said:

OH jesus.. Of course they're doing it, ITS GPS!! Now if they were spying through my cameras, that would be something to be concerned with...


Actually it doesn't use GPS for this, if you turn GPS off it still records all your movement. It records this through triangulation.

@Twesterm. If somebody stole your phone they could now find your house, where you work etc. Isn't that even slightly worrying to you?


Three things almost everyone has on their iPhone (or any smart phone) that doesn't require a password everytime:

  • Email
  • Contacts
  • Facebook

From those three I could easily figure out where you live and work.

How could you figure out where I live from that? I don't have my address on any of those (and my Facebook does require me to sign in every time).

Are you sure it requires you?  Unless you specifically tell it to log off, it stays logged in (same with twitter).

I would be willing to be that if you dug around in most peoples email, text messages, tweets, and Facebook messages/posts you could find their address.

If that didn't work, I'd still have control over your email address.  I would go to websites like Hallmark.com, Amazon, VGChartz, or anything else that requires an email address to reset a password and reset your password.  That password would be emailed to the email I have control of.

If I got something like your Amazon, Hallmark, or any eCommerce account I have your address, but I actually don't care about that.  If I have your email, that means I can probably log into your bank account.  From there I can do whatever I want.

So yeah, again, that location stuff isn't anything special.  If I steal your phone I can figure that stuff out with zero effort and that's not even the scary part.  Knowing where you live is no big deal (Hell, that's information you can look up in the phone book).  The iPhone tracking your every location should be the least of your worries.

Hopefully this post is a scary reminder to everyone to pass lock their iPhone.  It's an inconvience to put in the pass code every time but there's a lot of stuff on that phone you don't want people to get.