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Apple is not “recording your moves”
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#52How can the iPhone determine the location of a cell tower (or WiFi access point) just by receiving its signal? While it seems obvious from that analysis that it is indeed logging the locations of the towers rather than the phone, I am more interested in how it derives the locations for those towers. It could simply have a lookup table, but that would mean every iPhone has a lookup table of every cell tower (GSM and C…
They are getting it from a database, probably a proprietary one controlled by Apple.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#53By the way, this same information is already tracked and stored by the mobile networks themselves, and can be obtained by the government with a warrant (or likely by organizations like the NSA or CIA without one, given recent precedents).
See http://nce.fd.org/PDF%20Cellular%20Tower%20Location%20Inform... :
"Cellular service providers generally retain information about phones’ contacts with towers, including which tower(s) each phone contacted during any given check-in, and which “face” of the tower(s) the phone contacted."
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#54Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#55Site down, google cache not available!
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the iphone even have real GPS? I believe it uses the cell tower info only.
The iPhone 3G and later have real GPS. They use an A-GPS chip. The "A" in A-GPS stands for assisted, which means it can be assisted by the cell towers to help find the GPS satellites more quickly. Because of the connection with the cell network, some confuse its capabilities with plain triangulation. It will continue to function as a plain GPS device in the absence of cell service, however. Most of the points on my m…
You don't need to connect to the network for it to be recorded.
The Skyhook-alike ( Apple rolled its own: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/30/skyhook-loses-a-big-f... ) tech works because your device is able to poll available wireless AP MACs, even if you don't sign into them or know the password. 802.11 headers have a MAC frame that's always broadcast in the clear.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#57Interesting analysis that strongly suggests the coordinates are for cell towers, not the iOS device.[1] Personally, the fact that the file is in a cache directory path, and that some people don't have much data, or any, suggests to me that some programmer forgot to trim his cache or picked a ridiculously large size before he decides to trim. "locationd" wants to know the coordinates of the cell towers you communicate…
You do realize that the towers themselves have had that information about you forever, so AT&T (or now Verizon) can plot your every move.
Which can be a good thing, if, say, you get kidnapped, or someone gets murdered and they're trying to retrace their steps. What's not a good thing is if there's no one "watching the watchers".
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#58By the way, this same information is already tracked and stored by the mobile networks themselves, and can be obtained by the government with a warrant (or likely by organizations like the NSA or CIA without one, given recent precedents). See http://nce.fd.org/PDF%20Cellular%20Tower%20Location%20Inform... : "Cellular service providers generally retain information about phones’ contacts with towers, including which to…
with a warrant being the three magic words which totally changes the context. Oversight is important. There is no oversight to this data collection.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entire thing is in the FAQ. http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/#9
The FAQ has nothing to do with it. Nobody is contesting that cell tower location information is being used. The differing claim is this: the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are those of the device itself and these co-ordinates are possibly calculated using cell tower triangulation, while this blog post claims that the co-ordinates logged are those of the cell towers themselves rather than the…
why does such a small difference matter?
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be possible to get a best fit curve between all the towers to get a more accurate position.
Yep, it's called cell id location. I worked in mobile phone location about 8 years ago and you could find a rough position (about 200m radius IIRC) and we used it as a first pass. That was on GSM networks, 3G cells are smaller.
And the newer E911 requirements which kick in next year call for 100m accuracy.