Apple is not “recording your moves”
willclarke.net
Apple is not “recording your moves”
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Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#2The conclusion about a "general place at a general time" seems entirely true when you're on a highway, moving quickly and hopping infrequently to large distant cell towers. No wifi points anywhere close. Just like the chosen example.
I bet its entirely different when you're in any kind of built-up area. Wifi points every few hundred meters, small cell towers every kilometer or two. I bet in those situations, someone could derive a pretty close record of "your moves". Even if the individual points jump around, you're presumably hopping cells and seeing new Wifi APs every few minutes - even when you're just walking around your house or your office - and that data can be triangulated.
I think the OP is right inasmuch as Apple probably didn't set out to track users as much as keep track of connected wifi & cell APs. That doesn't mean the data won't be enough to track movements in urbanised areas.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#3The conclusion about a "general place at a general time" seems entirely true when you're on a highway, moving quickly and hopping infrequently to large distant cell towers. No wifi points anywhere close. Just like the chosen example. I bet its entirely different when you're in any kind of built-up area. Wifi points every few hundred meters, small cell towers every kilometer or two. I bet in those situations, someone…
I'm not the author. But I believe the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are of the device itself. It is not clear at all that this is true and the author of this post presents some evidence that would suggest otherwise.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#4Interesting 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 with in order to triangulate your position without turning on the GPS, and it doesn't want to eat the battery by querying servers all the time. That argues for a cache of the towers you frequent. It's only one bug or poorly chosen constant from there to the situation people are reporting.
[1] That still reports your travels in gross terms and is a problem in need of a fix.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#5The conclusion about a "general place at a general time" seems entirely true when you're on a highway, moving quickly and hopping infrequently to large distant cell towers. No wifi points anywhere close. Just like the chosen example. I bet its entirely different when you're in any kind of built-up area. Wifi points every few hundred meters, small cell towers every kilometer or two. I bet in those situations, someone…
I'm not the author. But I believe the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are of the device itself. It is not clear at all that this is true and the author of this post presents some evidence that would suggest otherwise.
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 moves" or not.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#6Has 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.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#7It looks like the original O'Reilly post was a bit imprecise.
On one hand, it says "your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file."
Later on, it mentions a "a list of hundreds of thousands of wireless access points that my iPhone has been in range of". This suggests that the list is one of cell towers (and perhaps Wi-Fi routers ?), but not actual device locations.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#8An aside: it's independent thought and experimentation like this makes hackers so important.
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#9A better statement is: "Apple is not intentionally recording your moves."
What they're instead doing is, when possible, retrieving cell network / SkyHook (wifi) data about Lat./Long. for towers/APs that your device can see and when it last saw them.
This is for the Location service that an iOS device offers, so that if you choose to provide your location information to an app and it can't get a good GPS lock - this cached information is used to provide a "best guess".
In addition, it's used to provide an accelerated guess as GPS gets a lock (it's the "+" in GPS+).
The timestamp is to provide "last best location". I'm sure the rest (MACs, tower IDs, etc.) can be used to triangulate a better fix based on what's visible and what signal strength to each location is like.
The device caches this information locally because the Lat./Long. of a cell tower / AP will not change - but the timestamp for the last time your phone has "seen" it could be updated, without having to re-hit Apple's servers for the details.
It's being done because: storage is cheap, the amount of data doesn't take much space for thousands of points, it reduces server talk, and it speeds up your GPS/location acquisition for apps that you wish to use it with.
Apple's only mistake is that they didn't encrypt this information. Outside of that, the only other thing they could have done would be to store it purely in RAM - but RAM is at more of a premium (in MB) than flash storage (in GB).
Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the author. But I believe the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are of the device itself. It is not clear at all that this is true and the author of this post presents some evidence that would suggest otherwise.
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.