[Source Kotaku]

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Your iPhone Is Secretly Tracking Everywhere You’ve Been

Republished from http://gizmodo.com

Honestly, this doesn't upset more than interest me.  I kind of want to see the information because I think it would be interesting to see.  If anything annoys me about it, it's that it's taking up space on my cramped-for-space phone.

If someone were to steal my phone and take this information, I would be much more annoyed that they stole my phone.  Everything they could learn about from where I've been they could easily find out by simply looking at other things on my phone along with things that would actually matter if they took.

This is quite disturbing. I have to wonder why on earth would they do this?

Edit: It appears that Apple isn't doing anything with the information. It may just be a cock up through miscommunication like the Google collecting WiFi data thing. It's also just as, if not slightly more, disturbing than that cock up.

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...

The issue people have is it stores all that movement.  So if you've had an iPhone since iOS4, every movement you've made since then is stored on your phone.

Again, I don't think it's a big deal because it's not sometihng transmitted and there isn't much someone could do with information if they stole your phone that they couldn't otherwise get.  I'm curious how big the file is though.  I assume it's a text file with coordinates so it can't be especially large but if you had a year or two worth of coordinates on there I imagine it could take some space.

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.

And just for perspective, other worrying things that could be found on your iPhone if stolen:

• Safari cache (how many user ID's and passwords have you saved?)
• your personal Wifi access
• Various other apps that don't require password prompts every time that you can change your personal information
• Amazon app
• Apple ID

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.

"Security Researchers"... so they mean Hackers.  Good thing Apple lost that lawsuit.