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IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

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121–130 of 196 posts

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#121
post #63

I didn't know this was news. I and other security researchers & law enforcement have known about it for a while. I assisted in one court case where the data was used as evidence. I suspect the slick-looking iPhoneTracker app finally made it interesting to the media. Edit: There was a similar deal on iOS 3 but it seemed more like a bug, not a feature. Data would be purged at some unpredictable interval. I can't recall…

In deed nothing new. About a year ago a man discovered that his wife's iPhone was sending about 75 Mb of data to Apple via wifi in early morning : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2450738?threadID=245073... It turned out it was dumps of GPS data and other stuffs. Apple acknowledged that to the House of Representatives. They're gathering data about their customers, including GPS : [PDF] http://markey.house.gov/doc…

What's news to me is that this is persisted forever on the device in an unencrypted format.

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#122
post #105
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the comparison was very apropos to the context and useful. Call me simplistic, but I'm glad it was cast and totally not inflamed (save for my original inflammation towards Apple).

It's not apropos. Can you be raped by your vibrator or your blow up doll? This is about a device passively logging data, not a moral agent doing something to you. Show me the person that Apple has hurt. The only people I've been reading about here taking actions are law enforcement officials, people in black helicopters, and betrayed lovers.

What you view as a device passively logging data, others may view as a company actively designing a device that logs data.

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#123
post #63

I didn't know this was news. I and other security researchers & law enforcement have known about it for a while. I assisted in one court case where the data was used as evidence. I suspect the slick-looking iPhoneTracker app finally made it interesting to the media. Edit: There was a similar deal on iOS 3 but it seemed more like a bug, not a feature. Data would be purged at some unpredictable interval. I can't recall…

[deleted]

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#124
post #63

I didn't know this was news. I and other security researchers & law enforcement have known about it for a while. I assisted in one court case where the data was used as evidence. I suspect the slick-looking iPhoneTracker app finally made it interesting to the media. Edit: There was a similar deal on iOS 3 but it seemed more like a bug, not a feature. Data would be purged at some unpredictable interval. I can't recall…

I don't understand how it can be used as evidence, it would be trivial to edit the file and give yourself an alibi. Or frame an innocent person.

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#126
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of marketing hype in here. There are a lot of mobile device collection tools and none of them fully collect every device out there. Also, collecting a 64GB i over USB will take at least 24 minutes. (You don't really just want the photos, do you.) That makes for a long traffic stop.

24 minutes is a long traffic stop? Have you never been pulled over for speeding? That's a positively snappy traffic stop... Also, what the hell are you doing turning over your phone to police officers during traffic stops......

Yes, I have. And been on my way in less than 15 minutes.

There are several reasons that one might turn over one's phone, all well documented in the media. The primary two are:

1) Voluntary cooperation with a request 2) Search incident to arrest

(Obligatory WTF on downvoting: I point out reasonable information and a technical challenge with doing this in the field based on personal experience as a forensic examiner, and I get downvoted?)

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#127
So after doing a quick analysis of the data on my iPhone, I've come to the conclusion that this isn't a huge issue at all.

First, I'll start with the WiFi data (WifiLocation table): Among the information captured is MAC, Timestamp, and Lat/Long. I have a total of 118,640 records in my table. I did a "SELECT DISTINCT MAC FROM WifiLocation", and got... 118,640 records. This tells me that it's not "tracking my every move" via Wifi location since there's a single entry for each MAC. The question might be, is it updating the Timestamp when I'm near a specific Wifi Network? My guess is no. I did the backup and analysis this morning, April 20th. Yet the last entries in my database are from April 16th. This tells me that it's not an always on tracker and that it's not updating timestamps.

Next, I looked at the CallLocation table: The same thing held true with this table. The last entry on my phone was from April 16th. Also, I have 6300 entries in my CellLocation table. I decided to start restricting the precision of the Lat/Long to see if there were duplicates that would indicate "tracking". At 5 decimal points, there were no duplicates. At 4 decimals, there were a handful that had 2 dups. At 3 decimals, there were more dups, with the most being 6. At this point I still had 5672 uniques. At 2 decimals, the most had 89 and I had 2468 uniques. At 1 it really went down, obviously, and I was down to 253 uniques. The other thing I noticed was that there was no regular timing of entries, and that when there were entries, a large number of them had the same timestamp.

So based on my analysis, this isn't a feature that enables detailed tracking of a user. It will allow you to see if a user has been in a certain location the first time, but that's the extent of it. For instance, I could see that I made a trip to Washington DC in late October of last year. But you can't really tell my movements around my home town with any amount of precision. My assumption, like others, is that Apple is using this to enable easier use of Location based services. I assume (which I'm going to test), that whenever a user enables a Location Based app (Google Maps, FourSquare), iOS updates this database with all local cell towers/wifi locations and the Latitude/Longitude. The more comprehensive the local database is, the quicker/easier it is for Location Based Services to help pinpoint a users location. Instead of waiting for GPS to spin up and get a satellite lock, it will be able to get a more accurate lock off of cell tower/wifi triangulation.

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#128
post #83

About 6 months ago, I left an ipad on a plane. Unsurprisingly, all my attempts to recover it led to dead ends. I didn't have the mobileme / findmyiphone app installed on it. I understand privacy concerns, but I'd actually like it if Apple did have a copy of this db, and they allowed me to proxy through them / law enforcement so that I could locate this lost device. I know someone has it b/c I can see they were using…

I think you're looking for something more like prey : http://preyproject.com/

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In deed nothing new. About a year ago a man discovered that his wife's iPhone was sending about 75 Mb of data to Apple via wifi in early morning : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2450738?threadID=245073... It turned out it was dumps of GPS data and other stuffs. Apple acknowledged that to the House of Representatives. They're gathering data about their customers, including GPS : [PDF] http://markey.house.gov/doc…

I noticed Google asks to do this in Android, too. They make you explicitly OK it though, at least on my (Verizon Droid) phone. In location options, if you check certain options it warns you that Google will be logging wifi info and other details even while apps that access this info are not running. The warning shown when you click "Use wireless networks" in Location settings is "Location consent Allow Google's locat…

Yes it does scan surrounding wifi SSID because Google Maps uses Skyhook ( http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ , belongs to Google) to geolocate users faster than just using pure GPS signal. So does Apple which also use Google Maps geolocation services on their iPhones.

My guess is that Apple is gathering all those data in order to build their own Skyhook. It makes sense, specially when you keep in mind that Apple bough the mapping company Poly9.

Re: IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

#130
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 minutes is a long traffic stop? Have you never been pulled over for speeding? That's a positively snappy traffic stop... Also, what the hell are you doing turning over your phone to police officers during traffic stops......

Yes, I have. And been on my way in less than 15 minutes. There are several reasons that one might turn over one's phone, all well documented in the media. The primary two are: 1) Voluntary cooperation with a request 2) Search incident to arrest (Obligatory WTF on downvoting: I point out reasonable information and a technical challenge with doing this in the field based on personal experience as a forensic examiner, a…

1) Never volunteer your property to be searched. That's just common sense. 2) Well that's hardly a traffic stop anymore. They're pretty free to take their time at that point.

(I didn't downvote you)

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