Apple I Phone Does Not Track Your Every Move As Reported.

Apple I Phone Does Not Track Your Every Move As Reported.

caffeine.shugendo.org

There’s been a lot of discussion of the discovery that there’s a database file called “consolidated.db” on your iPhone, full of latitude and longitude coordinates. Most of it has been completely hysterical, and not based on an actual look at the data involved.

I downloaded Peter Warden’s iPhoneTracker program, as well as the source code for it, and played around with it a good bit yesterday. I’m not done—I haven’t done a raw dump of the locations in the file yet—but I’ve been able to determine several things, the most important of which is that the iPhone is not “track

(visit the link for the full news article)

Please see this gentleman's full story at the link provided. He offers some great maps that he made with the data collected from his I Phone.

I knew there wasn't something right with these stories when I saw them. As anyone who owns an Apple knows Apple's are fairly free of these problems. Why would a company that makes spam eradication part of the basic architecture of their machines want to track your every move. There are better ways of doing that.

If you have an I Phone and you are concerned that you were being tracked somehow I am wondering why? There are so many ways that any one of us could be tracked down and traced that I am wondering why the focus on the I Phone.

It reminds me a little of when non-smokers focus on second hand smoke when there all are these other toxins they are assaulted by every moment of every day that they never even think to mention.

Anyhow, I Phoners, it is all OK.


caffeine.shugendo.org
(visit the link for the full news article)

It's ironic you posted this because I was just about to use similar technology to track one of my buddies.

There are apps for I-phones, and other technology for similar devices that allows you to "ping" a phone by calling it very briefly from a spoofed number, which then tells you the GPS coordinates of the person's phone that you just tried to call.


One of my other buddies showed this to me and it's pretty convenient sometimes. It definitely has the potential to be abused. But then again it is possible to fool someone by leaving your phone in places where you are not, for example, if anyone has real reason to track you using this.

Originally posted by Frater210
If you have an I Phone and you are concerned that you were being tracked somehow I am wondering why? There are so many ways that any one of us could be tracked down and traced that I am wondering why the focus on the I Phone.

Be specific...what are the "so many ways". I can't think of any that can track you as well as a phone. An Android or just about any other phone would work about as well, I don't think it needs to be an i-phone.

www.accutracking.com...

AccuTracking software turns your cell phones into a GPS tracking device (Motorola iDEN i### phones, RIM BlackBerry phones, Windows Mobile phones, Android phones). The AccuTracking online GPS cell phone tracking service lets you see real-time locations, speed, and headings of your children/family members or cars/vehicles, and receive email or SMS alerts when they move across the designated areas or exceeds speed limit.

Not only can you track your teen's every move, but you can even tell if they are driving over the speed limit or not when they borrow your car!

I don't know of anything else that can track you like this.

The phone company has records of which towers your phone was nearby at all times your phone is powered on, and federal agents have used those records to convict criminals showing they were in the place where a body was found shortly after a person disappeared.

Most of us aren't murderers, but some people do have mistresses, and might not want their wife hacking into the location data to find that the husband was really with his mistress instead of on that business trip. I know you or I would never do anything like that but some people do.

To me it's just kinda creepy to think someone can track my every move even if I'm not doing anything wrong.

reply to post by bsbray11


Thanks for the post. Yeah, folks don't understand the computing power they are carrying around. It is understated by the simple GUI of these new OSs and the fact that folks use them almost exclusively as social media devices.

That kind of cognitive dissonance amongst those buying and using these phones and other consumer electronics leaves a huge back door that can be exploited. And it is not even a failure on the part of the digital architecture that is causing the problem; it is in people's heads.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Agreed. I was thinking of your bank card and those supermarket cards and your internet habits. And just the simple fact that if someone with the intention of jailing you or rendering were trying to find you it would be no problem.

But, yeah. The phone applications for finding folks are at the seeming bleeding edge of all of this. Of course there are dedicated tracking devices that I have seen on the web as well.
l
And yes, I think that it is very telling that the spy vs spy technology is commonly used today to snoop on immediate family. friends and workmates. It is pretty awful, man.

Here is some more from the story...

A good example is the set of locations dated Christmas Day of last year:

I was in the Central Valley, in Le Grand (about 15 miles south of Merced) all day Christmas Day and I never left the house.

Not only does this show locations stretching from Santa Cruz in the West to Merced in the East (a distance of some 130-140 miles), but it shows movement up and down I5 for a distance of about 80 miles or so. So, it’s entirely unclear to me what this data actually represents.

What it most certainly doesn’t represent is the phone’s “tracking your every move” as the histrionic writers at Wired and The Atlantic would like you to think…

reply to post by Frater210


Sure, and google and failbook do not report to the CIA.
Iphones are better than an rfid chip, they broadcast around the world not just a few feet away.

Dont forget the "Earth is flat" yes...

The real point of my sub text is to say that it is a known entity; all this snooping on the public stuff.

You buy it when you don't think about the consumer electronics you purchase.

If you really want to escape it then you better go download TinyCore Linux and start to learn about the command line. Or something like that.

Otherwise when you purchase these devices and activate them in your name you have just forfeited your anonymity.

May as well enjoy it. Enjoy the I Phone or Galaxy or whatever. Join Facebook. Follow folks on Twitter. I am just saying don't get all uppity if you notice that you are being spied upon.

i thought disinformation agents violate the terms and conditions of ats.

all i saw from that link was that there were literally hundreds of points on the map pinpointing locations. it may not be real time tracking but from that information i could tell that you were in the east end of the city, what route you took to get there, how long you where there and at what time.

that seems like tracking to me. and with that information it wouldn't be hard to find you.

the only information a phone should collect is usage to determine billing charges. that's it. not tracking my whereabouts.

maybe hollywood should do it's job and release a film about a serial computer nerd that hacks iphones to find and kill it's targets.

maybe what will change this dangerous abuse of privacy.

Guess what android peeps, your phone is tracking you too

github.com...

Well this is a red letter day then. I have been marked down as a dis-info agent. I thought confetti would fall out of the ceiling or something.

Folks. The only people who care where you are at is your loved ones or your workmates. And if you are a student then the school you attend has various reasons to want you in your seat and they all have to do with money.


And also, I did not write the article. I only linked you to it and I agree with the author's conclusions.

Originally posted by Frater210

If you have an I Phone and you are concerned that you were being tracked somehow I am wondering why?

You are? Strange.

You're wondering "why" I'm concerned about being tracked... I don't know, maybe because it's none of your damn business and I do not need an excuse to my desire/right to privacy.

Your question of "why" is nothing more than a strawman tactic, much like police who employ the same method to intimidate naive people into giving up their right to privacy with:

""Well, if you don't have anything to hide or have something illegal, then of course you would mind us doing a quick search? Right?""

I'm concerned that you would ask "why" of anyone concerned with being track.

It doesn't use gps so it's not accurate like gps would be. On the other hand if it were gps tracking that can tell hundreds of meters wrong. I sometimes do geotagging and I've learned to take several shots of each subject because of this.

reply to post by kneverr


Yeah, sorry. I do wonder why people who live on what is essentially a giant farm would be concerned about being tracked.

I thought I would add my two cents...

Firstly, these large public companies are primarily concerned with the price of their shares. This one factor dictates most of their actions and they will not actively make a move that would lower their share price.

Secondly, although we are not aware of the raw data that our devices upload without our knowledge, it is perfectly possible to monitor it. Many individual hobbyists, or professional security analysts, make it their business to monitor such transfers and publish the results. This is how it was found that Microsoft was secretly verifying who was using a pirated or genuine version of Windows - this was discovered and published, which gave bad press to Microsoft, and they were made to remove that functionality.

The iPhone does know exactly where you are due to the GPS chip, but Apple does not need to collect that information, and I would doubt that they would risk the repercussions of secretly uploading it on a regular basis. It would be found out. On the contrary, they allow you to disable that functionality in the settings.

Additionally, not that many people own an iPhone. Most people use other phones. I doubt that iPhone users are considered to represent a threat.

This is not to say that the governments do not track where you are. I am just saying that the functionality of this is unlikely to be built into consumer devices sold by for-profit companies. Instead the governments will focus on a lower-level system, that is, recording and analyzing data after it left your phone/computer and before it reached its destination. The governments would not force a company to integrate their spying into the systems to be sold (at least for now), instead they would just subpoena the company for its databases, under a guise of looking for terrorist activity or whatnot (they do not have to provide detail), then match this personal information to the raw data they collect from transit.

We already know that most governments have systems built in place for monitoring communications, and this is built into the systems of the telephone companies. It has been that way for a long time, and I don't think anyone is denying it.

But it wouldn't be done directly from the consumer end (e.g. having your iPhone directly upload your coordinates at every step), at least for now.

Just a final thought:

When I took photos of the alchemical process for the thread in Philosophy/Metaphysics forum, I took it with an iPhone. I was just about to upload the photos when I remembered to check for personal data. Imagine my horror when the file metadata contained by GPS coordinates! I tried to remove this using Windows "remove personal data" button in the properties of the file, it did not remove. I tried to open the photo, resize and save as. Still there. The only way to get rid of it was to copy and paste the photo into a new file. Of course this is not a conspiracy, it would be useful in most cases, but it shows how easily you can give out very personal information without knowing.

reply to post by sign00


Holee Crap, Sign00. Thanks for sharing that. I have a new respect for these devices.

I personally do not own a smart phone but every week that goes by makes me happier that I do not.

The more I have been thinking about it the more my sense of humour turns dark. Or maybe it is my love for Christopher Walken and things just get a little mixed up; but I really am surprised that people are surprised that these devices perform like a leash. Or maybe a cow bell...

reply to post by Frater210


The problem is not that people are doing something wrong and want to hide it. The problem is that people know the definition of "doing something wrong" is subjective, and could expand to include, say, posting on certain internet message boards. Or collecting stamps -- whatever, the point is that we can't give away our rights to privacy even if we're innocent of anything embarrassing or illegal or immoral, because at any time the same ability used to find actual criminals could be used for any other purpose.