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Apple is not “recording your moves”

willclarke.net

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Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#11

Post by jamesbkel »

I've been playing around with the source today (planning to take a closer look at the file itself tomorrow). While there are definitely a fair amount of anomalie, even without removing the intended obfuscation in iPhoneTracker it still tells a good story. After adjusting the accuracy of the GPS grid and changing the animation to daily, it was easy to track where I had been.

It would probably be hard to track to any specific address (that's what I am looking into now) but by matching date with the coordinates it was trivial to see where I went for: 4th of July, my friends bachelor party and wedding, Halloween, Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve... among other events.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#12

Post by angusgr »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #10
angusgr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the article is a reasonable refutation to that part of the O'Reilly claim, and that is an important fact to clarify. The article goes further though, and claims it's "not 'recording your moves'" and is just a "general place at a general time". I don't you can say that point-blank. As stated, I think that it's going to be entirely location-dependent as to whether the database can be treated as a "record of your…

The author says he was using his phone and the GPS often. If they wanted to track your moves and you have turned on the GPS, why doesn't it just, y'know, use the GPS data? Instead Apple tries to track your moves using cell towers? Seems like the only way this would be a record of your moves would be by coincidence.

To quote from my original comment: Apple probably didn't set out to track users ... That doesn't mean the data won't be enough to track movements in urbanised areas.

Whether this is really a scandal, I don't know. But it certainly seems surprising to me.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#13

Post by evan_ »

angusgr wrote: post #6

Has anyone looked at the coordinates in the Wifilocation table? For cell towers, iOS has access to coordinates from the tower's signal itself. For Wifi, the best approximation would be the GPS location of the device. Unless it associates Wifi APs with nearby cell towers, or "fuzzes" that location.

iOS uses skyhook (or a workalike) to turn wifi MAC addresses into geospatial locations.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#14

Post by neworbit »

The only way this could be more hair-splitty is to argue "Apple isn't tracking you, it's tracking your device". Yes, there are valid reasons for this to exist. Doesn't change my user perspective that this is an electronic trail I do not want readily accessible.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#15

Post by Shantz »

I can't comment on the website itself somehow. But here is my comment.

While you may be correct (and I think you are, because Apple has previously mentioned that they use such data to map tower locations) but I have a few counter points to your article (may not refute your main conclusion): 1. Even Cell Triangulation can be way off depending on a lot of factors. I use it regularly on my Android phone with Tasker for some profile purposes and it gives me worse results most of the times than actually working with exact tower ID that I am seeing. I've seen it being as off as upto 5 kms

2. The location data is collected for other countries as well, not just for the parent network within US. Out of the various articles from various people, they have seen data from all places where they used cell services, including abroad like Japan, India, etc. The data only seems to be missing when they don't have a cell service.

3. What irks me is that why they need to store this data on the device and PC? Even if they were building their own cell tower database, it should be done and done once apple gets the data. Why would they keep a whole history about it on the phone and PC? Maybe it is an oversight? But I can't find any reasonable explanation for this.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#17

Post by X-Istence »

jamesbkel wrote: post #11

I've been playing around with the source today (planning to take a closer look at the file itself tomorrow). While there are definitely a fair amount of anomalie, even without removing the intended obfuscation in iPhoneTracker it still tells a good story. After adjusting the accuracy of the GPS grid and changing the animation to daily, it was easy to track where I had been. It would probably be hard to track to any s…

I looked at my data, and it didn't know that I had spent a whole lot of time at the office last week, but it did know the cell towers along the way to my friends house when I used Google Maps.

It is only updated when you use a location based service. Google Maps, Places on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and the like. I don't use anything besides Google Maps and only to get information on how to get to certain locations. Honestly I am not to worried about it.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#18

Post by angusgr »

I actually think my honest opinion on this fiasco is "someone can derive a user's movements from this database, but how big a deal is it really?"

I still think this should be fixed, Apple should explain it and release an update that pares it down to the bare minimum data for whatever function it serves.

However, let's honestly go through the implications of this:

- The user's cell provider already knows this. [1]

- If someone "owns" the user's phone then they can get their movement history. But that's at a point where they can track the user's current movements anyhow, so that's lose-lose there - the only difference is the historical angle.

- If someone steals the user's computer/phone they can get their previous history up until then. That's bad, but I bet nearly everyone has more sensitive private information available on their computer hard disk or their iPhone's internals - stuff that would be more exploitable than historical location data.

- Someone could maybe sneak private API calls into a legit app that sent this database somewhere else. No idea how feasible that is. However, if they can do that then it's pretty close to the "ownage" scenario described above - they can probably do anything anyhow.

If it comes out that Apple is sending this data back to Cupertino for some nefarious purpose then that is very bad as well, but I bet that's not the case.

[1] http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protecti...

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#19

Post by msbarnett »

neworbit wrote: post #14

The only way this could be more hair-splitty is to argue "Apple isn't tracking you, it's tracking your device". Yes, there are valid reasons for this to exist. Doesn't change my user perspective that this is an electronic trail I do not want readily accessible.

Is it really "readily accessible"? It's on your phone, and in backups on your computer if you've synced your phone.

So to access it, a person needs access to either your phone or computer. But if they have access to your phone or computer, is a cache of cell towers you've connected to really a significant concern compared to the other things the accessor could get ahold of from either of these devices?

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#20

Post by Pahalial »

The piece is specifically positioned as a retort to a somewhat sensationalist O'Reilly piece, and in that context it's perhaps decent. But this headline alone on HN is at least as sensationalist - redefining "your phone is tracking your movements between cell towers with a general accuracy of 2km or less" to "your phone is not recording your moves" is just newspeak.

Argue that the accuracy makes the data less usable for nefarious purposes, or argue the (much more pertinent to my mind) point that your carrier already has high-accuracy historical info and this really just puts similar historical info in your hands as well, point out that law enforcement can easily get the carrier info without ever even touching your iDevice, but don't try to claim that this is not recording location info attached to you.

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