Re: Transparent tracking with iphone.
sendai <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.sf.killerbs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 22/04/2011, at 14:42, Dave Land <[email protected]> wrote: > On Apr 21, 2011, at 8:31 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > >> Wonder what David thinks of this? >> >> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/04/20/iphone.tracking/ > > David _Brin_ thinks this: > > http://twitter.com/#!/DavidBrin1/status/61181497515843584 > > "Spy Conspiracy: Your iPhone is secretly tracking everywhere you've been, all the time via @Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/#!5793925/your-iphone-is-secretly-tracking-everywhere-youve-been" > > David _Land_ thinks this: > > http://twitter.com/#!/dland/status/61206837550252032 > > "@DavidBrin1 @Gizmodo What a non-story: the phone stores data locally, doesn't transmit it. Where's the problem?" > > It's the biggest non-story of the tech news year so far. I think Tim O'Reilly put it out there to try to FUD up the Apple earnings announcement and draw attention to himself while news orgs were tuned in to the Apple frequency. I have no comment on O'Reilly's motives, but consolidated.db is an open-/secret/, to the extent where it was discussed at WWDC, and in various developer documentations. Had people bothered to actually look at the documentation, data, etc. They'd find that it's logging the location of towers. This is the contents of consolidated.db from a freshly restored device: http://www.danaquarium.com/tmp/30minutes.jpg See how it pings towers over 30km away. Overall, consolidated.db is used to increase the accuracy of _a_GPS. The better a device knows the positions of towers, the better it can position you indoors, underground, etc. > > Shameless, really. > > Dave