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Apple is not “recording your moves”

willclarke.net

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Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#41

Post by skidooer »

nosignal wrote: post #36

How 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…

I'm not entirely familiar with the protocols in use, but I assume the cell towers publish their GPS coordinates.

When my carrier installed a new tower in my area, Google Maps would start with my location hundreds of miles away until the GPS locked on. It eventually corrected itself, but I assumed at the time that they had the wrong GPS coordinates entered for that cell location.

There are dots on my map for places I have never been, so I don't think it is coming from the on-board GPS receiver.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#42

Post by justsee »

angusgr wrote: post #26
justsee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I made in another thread on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2468950 Basically by having it stored locally, it lowers the barriers to accessing data, so that it is no longer restricted to law enforcement people seeking telco data. That changes a lot of things. For instance imagine you're a police informant or undercover cop: a technically savvy mob would be silly not to hoover up the location data…

For instance imagine you're a police informant or undercover cop: a technically savvy mob would be silly not to hoover up the location data of everyone in their org, Sure, but if they have root or physical access to the phone (which they need) they can install a realtime tracking snooper to follow you around instead. I agree this lowers the barrier, but fundamentally it seems to come down to - if you don't want peopl…

The point to be made here is that Apple's provided almost universal, historical snooping capabilities without any individual actors having to get James Bond on the situation. Every iOS device has the potential to reveal someone made a trip to a police station, or spent a lot of time in a suburb that doesn't match with a particular story.

The fact that people of sufficient technical capability and motivation can always install traffic snoopers with greater resolution / utility doesn't change any of the above?

I suppose this situation is a little like the Firesheep release. Things could already be exploited, but by reducing the effort and skill required it significantly changed the security / privacy situation.

Your final point is a bit of a false dilemma, because Apple can just fix the issue to remove that particular security concern. Of course the device is still tracked by networks, but as discussed the barrier to access that information is probably high enough for many people.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#43

Post by tmcw »

angusgr wrote: post #2

The 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…

This entire thing is in the FAQ. http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/#9

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#44

Post by iang »

uuilly wrote: post #34
angusgr wrote: post #2

The 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…

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.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#45

Post by iang »

thought_alarm wrote: post #35
Pahalial wrote: post #20

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…

How about this headline: "Your iPhone is caching cell tower coordinates for faster location lookups". Is that sensationalist? Or, does it represent the most logical explanation of this story from a technical and engineering background?

It's a long time since I worked on mobile phones but in GSM the phone has to keep an internal of the tower it's connected to and the nearest neighbours in order to manage handover smoothly (ie. With dropping calls). I suspect 3G is similar.

In GSM the phone also had to know the distances to each tower +/-500m in order to adjust the timings for communication with the tower.

(It's 8 years since I did is stuff so memory might be off on the numbers a bit :-)

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#46

Post by mercurio »

tmcw wrote: post #43
angusgr wrote: post #2

The 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…

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 device.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#47

Post by Mafana0 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #35
Pahalial wrote: post #20

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…

How about this headline: "Your iPhone is caching cell tower coordinates for faster location lookups". Is that sensationalist? Or, does it represent the most logical explanation of this story from a technical and engineering background?

It doesn't. GSM system, or any other similar standard, is based on the idea to frequently search for the most convenient cells in the immediate vicinity to connect to.

How can the phone know that the stored location, of a previous cell is good enough to connect to next time you are nearby again? It hasn't stored your location while you were connected to the cell at the first place. How would the phone know that there's no closer, better cell to connect to next time you're near that stored cell?

The OP's rationalization doesn't make much sense, IMHO.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#49

Post by tienshiao »

My guess is that this is just an implementation optimization. Probably analogous to lookupd caching DNS lookups. The developers probably didn't think anything of it.

Even lookupd caches could be represented in similar light: "Your Mac secretly records the websites you visit in a hidden file." It's just that we're all used to (and understand) DNS lookup caches, and locationd and location lookups are relatively young.

Re: Apple is not “recording your moves”

#50

Post by neworbit »

msbarnett wrote: post #19
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?

I've had phones stolen enough that I'd say "yes, too accessible" - your mileage may vary.

Timestamped travel information generally equates to "hey, this guy returns home between 7 and 8:30 most nights, works in the office five days a week, and here's where his home is". It's no great stretch to equate that to "he will not be home during this time frame" and suddenly a lost phone turns into a much larger burglary.

There's also plenty of larger privacy concerns, but even just the out-and-out-crook scenarios should be concerning enough.

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