Sunday, May 1, 2011

Confirmed: iPhone and iPad secretly track and store your location

Apple's iPhone and iPad have been tracking the locations of users in a hidden file, according to The New York Times.

Computer programmers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, presented their findings last week at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 technology conference in San Francisco. Their research showed the iPhone and 3G iPads have been logging the location data for the past year after a software update installed a new hidden file on the mobile devices.

The location and time, which are tracked through cell phone towers and Wi-Fi networks and stored on the devices, are copied over to users' hard drives when the devices are synced with a computer, the programmers said.

Apple stayed silent on the issue for a week until Google, which was also found to have a tracking program on phones that use its Android system, responded with a statement that the information collected was anonymous. Apple then followed in kind, mirroring Google's anonymity claims, according to a recent USA Today article.

http://www.naturalnews.com/032239_iPhone_tracking.html