[Fredslist] iPhone location tracking

Thu Apr 28 12:26:59 EDT 2011

That's not tracking.

That's enhanced surveillance.

-Raj 
Raj Goel, CISSP 
CTO, Brainlink International, Inc. 
Raj at brainlink.com 
917-685-7731 
You run your business, and leave the IT to us.

Danny Mizrahi <dm at contangoit.com> wrote:

Very nice, thanks Corey (and Jonathan).

I must chime in - since we did this at my office.  We connected my iPhone to the computer and ran the software everyone is talking about.  There are some semantics that are making it so Apple saves face here.  Fact of the matter is....we ran the software and it knew everyone I've been for more than 1 year.  If that's not "tracking," I'm not sure what is.  I saw it with my own eyes.

 Danny Mizrahi

 p:  (212) 737-0608
 m: (516) 606-4326
 f:   (877) 737-2282
 www.contangoit.com

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Corey Bearak <bearak at aol.com> wrote:

I received this explanation (see below) from my son who remains my unofficial tekkie (sorry that he remains generally unavailable because he pursues another professional calling but we have some fine computer consultants in Gotham anyway).

Corey B. Bearak, Esq.
Government & Public Affairs Counselor
P.O. Box 135, Glen Oaks, NY 11004
(718) 343-6779 ♦ facsimile (888) 379-3492
Bearak at aol.com ♦ CoreyBearak.com ♦ Bearak on Twitter

If you receive this email and did not request it, please reply and I will kindly remove your email address from the list.

This Internet Email Transmission may contain Confidential or Privileged Information which is intended only for use by the individual or entity for which the transmission is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, dissemination, copying or distribution of this transmission is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify this office by telephone immediately so that we can arrange for the return of the documents to us at no cost to you.

[sent from my MacBook Pro]

On Apr 27, 2011, at 10:17 PM, Jonathan Marc Bearak wrote:

Only since you sent me an email forwarding some posts worried/complaining about location tracking...

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html

According to Apple, they didn't respond until now (a week later) b/c they weren't sure what people were talking about, and needed to investigate, and then figure out how to explain it to non-compuer scientists.

The file that people claimed was Apple tracking locations is actually a database of WiFi hotspots and cell phone towers, some dozens of miles away.  It's a cache which the phone uses to speed up the process of finding one's location.  With pure GPS, it could take really long, so the iPhone keeps a cache of cell towers to triangulate, and then further uses this data to pick which GPS satellites to pay attention to.  That said, this data is also sent anonymously to Apple -- that's how they match the cell towers and hotspots with locations in the first place.  As it turns out, they arbitrarily set the size of the cache to 2 MB.  This stores way more information than is apparently necessary, so they're going to shrink its size.  They're also going to encrypt it and remove it from the phone backup program.  So, this was a little bit of a mistake, but it didn't actually track people's locations -- it was a cache containing the coordinates WiFi hotspots and cellular phone towers, so the phone can calculate this offline w/o contacting Apple's servers. =

The link Jonathan provided goes to this text:

April 27, 2011

Apple Q&A on Location Data

Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone? 
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this? 
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location? 
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 this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone? 
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. 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 anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today? 
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. 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.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?  
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? 
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.

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?  
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important? 
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.

Software Update 
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, anddeletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Press Contacts:
Natalie Harrison
Apple
harri at apple.com
(408) 862-0565

Natalie Kerris
Apple
nat at apple.com
(408) 974-6877

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website, or call Apple's Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042.

Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iPhone and iTunes are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

_______________________________________________
Fredslist mailing list
Fredslist at gothamnetworking.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.gothamnetworking.com/pipermail/fredslist/attachments/20110428/1b5f653a/attachment.html