On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 10:37:24AM -0400, Mat Maessen wrote: > On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 10:35 AM, William Robb > <anotherdrunken...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Apparently, if you have an iPhone, it it almost constantly recording it's > > whereabouts (and generally it's owner's whereabouts) on an almost continuous > > basis. > > Every smartphone that has a GPS in it does this. It's how the > applications on the phone know where you are. > > > My understanding is that it also sends this information back to Apple > > periodically. > > Incorrect. > > -Mat
No - he's correct. Didn't you see the big uproar about this? Apple turned this on as part of a software update. As a result of the details becoming public, they added a way for a user to turn off the location gathering, they truncated the amount of information kept on the phone, they stopped gathering the information when the phone was turned off, and they stopped copying that file to your computer when you synced with your iTunes library. But as far as I know they still send the information to Apple. Supposedly it gets anonymised first, but I don't know how effectively that gets done. Not that iPhones are unique in this kind of behaviour. That's valuable data (which cell towers, wireless networks, etc., are visible from a location). But, as Google also discovered, gathering that kind of information can be a risky business, unless you are scrupulously careful about how you do it. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
