101–110 of 159 posts
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 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 ano…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, but that would be crazy. If what they're saying is true (and there's no reason to doubt it at this point), they're using this in order to provide you with a service: the ability for your phone to know where you are in your city. Calling it "tracking data" is wrong, even. Given their description of how the cell tower/hotspot data is used, it seems like deleting "this cache entirely when Location Services is turne…
>Calling it "tracking data" is wrong, even. I wish people would stop saying this. Of course it's tracking data. There's nothing wrong with that. One of the phone's features is tracking your location so you don't get lost. Personally I think Apple has overreacted. They just need to provide a configuration setting for the size of the cache, and more importantly not include it in backups. A cache is not important enough…
Hell, I get a text message from Rogers the second I land in the US to let me know that roaming rates apply. The fact that I have a device that has to talk to another end point means that I can be tracked.
Alright...
>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.
...... The collection of anonymous traffic data involves tracking your location to determine what road you're on and what speed you're going. They can't even get their story straight.
> "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. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce thi…
> Furthermore, short of magic, there is no way to send a relevant subset of the crowd sourced data to an iPhone without first knowing both the location of the iPhone and its unique identity. If you consider recording the id of the cell tower the phone is connected to magic..
The most charitable case would be that Apple only tracks location based on the cell tower to which the iPhone is connected. The worst case is that it tracks location based on every hotspot and celltower the iPhone sees.
Since the most charitable case would produce the least predictive power when selecting a relevant subset of the crowd sourced data and the worst tracking case would produce the most predictive power - and given the level of detail reported to be stored on the iPhone is consistent with the worst case and less consistent with the most charitable case - the worst case scenario regarding tracking would appear to be more likely.
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that: - reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, - ceases backing up this cache, and - deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. Looks reasonable to me. The only thing missing that I'd like to see is an option to opt out of the tracking data (anonymous or not).
Hm, although an opt-out option might seem a reasonable request, Apple has to draw a line somewhere. If you want to have fast and accurate positioning, you have to provide them with your anonymous tracking data. That's the tradeoff, which I think is also reasonable to most people. (I wish Apple would take that same stance with regard to crash logs. If you want stuff from the App Store, you have to let iTunes send your…
No I don't have to.
I am currently working on an offline positioning system based on a (hopefully complete) dataset of all GSM-Cells in the world (http://myapp.fr/cellsIdData/). The sqlite3-database is currently 25MB big with some room for optimization. I do this for Android but the iPhone also has enough space to hold this data. Although I think it would be impossible with iOS because of missing APIs to be notified when the cell tower changes.
I'm sure that cell towers are enough for Assisted GPS to get a quick fix.
If people would have found a data set of all cell towers ids and coordinates no one would have had concerns about privacy.
Tracking data is only anonymous if it cannot be de-anonymized. Since I cannot check that this is not the case (with Apple, Google and Skyhook) I have doubts about the so called anonymity.
edit:
I am looking for a comprehensive dataset of wifi access points MAC-adresses and coordinates
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 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 ano…
Yup! The crowdsourcing part (how they initially assembled and now maintain the hotspot database) needs a bit more clarifying. The release glosses over it and people everywhere are instead fretting about the file, even though it's just a cache, a mere fragment of Apple's data, not theirs.
The iPhone UX makes it very obvious that apps are using location services but it never conveys that the iPhone user is contributing data back to Apple, even if anonymously. This is new information for everyone, I guess.
Ironically, shrinking the geolocation cache will result in more frequent requests to the server, making it theoretically easier for Apple to track your location.
GPS doesn't require requests to a server, AFAIK.
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 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 ano…
Furthermore Apple implies that they uncovered the but themselves.
The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we
uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update
section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store
more than seven days of this data.
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 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 ano…
Actually it is because the data is made anonymous not because it is encrypted. If they do this correctly they really don't know it is you.