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Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

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Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#51

Post by apinstein »

cooldeal wrote: post #33
foobarbazetc wrote: post #20

Oh no, reasonable and accurate information. Plus a list of things they plan to do to fix it. What will we all hate on Apple about next?

So you think the people who were reporting on these issues and caused Apple to fix them did it to hate on Apple? Tthe issues were real and not made up because Apple is now fixing them. Would they have fixed it if every reporter acted like Gruber? Why do some people take it as a personal insult if people point out that Apple can ship buggy software?

I think people jumped to the conclusion that Apple was logging your actual location, which would be a big deal, and published it as fact. It's a great story and gets traffic.

That said, I cannot imagine that if they'd contacted Apple about the issue they would have gotten a useful answer without the publicity.

Bottom line though is that any sufficiently sensational story gets traffic regardless of its truth or lack of attempt to even verify the veracity of the alleged problem.

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#52

Post by MatthewPhillips »

mrcharles wrote: post #50
tjogin wrote: post #42

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years. Interesting. Apple generally does not pre-release information about upcoming products, at all. They must have fel…

IMO the most interesting thing -- I was just daydreaming on the way to work of a mapping app that basically tracked your route, and compared timestamps of movement against expected times to generate an accurate realtime traffic map when shared with a central server. The problem with traffic info right now is that it's always either laughably late (see sirius/xm traffic info) or it's based on eyes-in-the-sky style upd…

Google Maps on Android does exactly that, it's great. especially in the summer time, makes it easy to find ways around construction.

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#53

Post by msravi »

1. This explanation seems to ignore the timestamps that are stored along with the hotspots/towers data. What do the timestamps represent? The time when the cache was downloaded onto the phone?

2. Speculatively, the way this seems to work is, that the phone identifies a tower, say, with ID12345. It then looks up the crowdsourced database for the tower with this ID, and queries it for all towers/hotspots within X miles radius. The result of the query is logged into the consolidated.db file, along with the current timestamp.

3. I don't know about the 100 miles number, but for me, in an urban setting, it certainly seems to be accurate upto approximately a mile or so, that together with the timestamp, gives a reasonably accurate picture of where I've been, and when.

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#54

Post by MatthewPhillips »

apinstein wrote: post #51
cooldeal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think the people who were reporting on these issues and caused Apple to fix them did it to hate on Apple? Tthe issues were real and not made up because Apple is now fixing them. Would they have fixed it if every reporter acted like Gruber? Why do some people take it as a personal insult if people point out that Apple can ship buggy software?

I think people jumped to the conclusion that Apple was logging your actual location, which would be a big deal, and published it as fact. It's a great story and gets traffic. That said, I cannot imagine that if they'd contacted Apple about the issue they would have gotten a useful answer without the publicity. Bottom line though is that any sufficiently sensational story gets traffic regardless of its truth or lack o…

There were plenty of sensational stories, sure. There were also many reasonable stories that debated what was being tracked, many of which were discussed on HN. You can't invalidate a story because some people become sensationalist, that always happens on any controversial story.

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#55

Post by Hagelin »

cooldeal wrote: post #33
foobarbazetc wrote: post #20

Oh no, reasonable and accurate information. Plus a list of things they plan to do to fix it. What will we all hate on Apple about next?

So you think the people who were reporting on these issues and caused Apple to fix them did it to hate on Apple? Tthe issues were real and not made up because Apple is now fixing them. Would they have fixed it if every reporter acted like Gruber? Why do some people take it as a personal insult if people point out that Apple can ship buggy software?

Of course we couldn’t have Apple news without Gruber bashing.

"The big question, of course, is why Apple is storing this information. I don’t have a definitive answer, but the best at least somewhat-informed theory I’ve heard is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.”

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/21/andy-ihnatko-loc...

"The key question for Apple: Given that this file was widely known among iOS forensics experts back in September, why does it still contain historical (as opposed to just recent) location history today?”

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/21/watts-martin

"Android phones store the same type of location information, but, unlike iOS, Android’s cache only contains recent entries — which is to say Android is doing it right.”

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/21/android-location...

"Really good questions” [About Senator Al Frankens letter to Steve Jobs on iPhone location tracking]

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/21/franken

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#56

Post by stitchy »

sounddust wrote: post #45
diminish wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your need is too exotic and mainstream concerns about location/timestamp tracking on iphone are real, valid concerns.

It's a common scenario in Europe. It's not "exotic" to take a €39 train ride from Paris to Brussels to visit for the weekend. I don't think it's a privacy concern to store such data locally on the phone. In any case, it should be resolved by letting the user decide how long to cache the data; that would make everyone happy.

Even so, the data should not be stored in a plain text file. Doing so gives any iPhone application access to that location data. Apple claims that it manages location preferences by application, but that's not true as long as this file exists in a plain text format.

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#58

Post by thenduks »

cooldeal wrote: post #47
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #3

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location? The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested This actually makes sense - looking at the logs on my iPhone and iPad, the lo…

>and actually there was a very great deal of places where I've never been, not even close. How does that make sense? It should only cache the locations of cell phone towers it was in the range of. Are you seeing data that was more than 100 miles away from the places you were at?

> Are you seeing data that was more than 100 miles away from the places you were at?

Yes, actually. I used the app that was posted and, even after I modified the code to stop fuzzy-ing the data, I was thinking to myself "well, I've never been anywhere close to there".

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#59

Post by Xuzz »

stitchy wrote: post #56
sounddust wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common scenario in Europe. It's not "exotic" to take a €39 train ride from Paris to Brussels to visit for the weekend. I don't think it's a privacy concern to store such data locally on the phone. In any case, it should be resolved by letting the user decide how long to cache the data; that would make everyone happy.

Even so, the data should not be stored in a plain text file. Doing so gives any iPhone application access to that location data. Apple claims that it manages location preferences by application, but that's not true as long as this file exists in a plain text format.

That is incorrect. The iPhone employs sandboxing, so most areas of the filesystem are not accessible to iOS applications, and this cache is in one of those restricted locations. An app on the phone cannot read this information.

However, it is included in the iTunes backups. Those can be read -- but only on your computer, not on the iPhone itself.

(An exception to the above would be a jailbroken phone: the packages installed via Cydia would not have the same restrictions, although the recent jailbreaks do not remove the restrictions on apps from the App Store.)

Re: Apple Q&A on gathering and use of location data (Apple Press Release)

#60

Post by cubicle67 »

cooldeal wrote: post #41
pieter wrote: post #2

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data I hate it when companies use 'encrypted' like it would somehow make your data more secure in their hands. They mean here they use something like SSL so snooping the traffic is impossible, but of course they can still read what…

>EDIT: come on HN, since when did we start downvoting stuff you don't want to hear? This is a valid point, if you have critizism just leave a comment. If you want to downvote something, do it on the summary comments. Sheesh. You must be new to HN, any post that can be construed as criticizing Apple, whether legitimate or not will either be ignored or downvoted. On the other hand, anything justifying Apple's actions,…

You must be new to HN too, or you haven't actually read many HN Apple discussions
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