The Apple JudasPhone

Good Lord - a few days ago we published a note about how Smartphones are watching you (and listening etc) , but we had no idea it was this bad - the iPhone tracks your movement and timestamps it, whether you have GPS turned on or off, and saves it to a non encrypted file that it then uploads when you synch (again without you knowing). What worries me is not so much the tracking itself, but that Apple didn't feel it was necessary to tell its users that this was happening, nor to use a secure method of storing the data - i.e what was going on in their heads?. This feature is alluded to in the 15,000 word "terms and conditions" but fairly obliquely - "May track", "aggregated data" etc - not "there is a file on your phone tracking your exact moves and timestamping them, that gets uploaded automatically to any computer you synch to and moves from your old phone to your new phone". That is not a "may" or an "aggregated" or an off switch in any of that! I agree with Andy Ihnatko when he says your Smartphone is:

....a master key to pretty much everything we’ve got going on in our lives: where we’ve been, the people with whom we associate, what we say, and all of the things we’ve seen that we considered worth snapshotting. The phone maker should be both completely open about the data the device collects and should act as though disastrous things would happen if that data were ever to fall into the wrong hands. Because they would. The worst-case scenario of a lost or stolen or otherwise compromised phone is pretty goddamned bad.

Your personal Jesus Device is turning into more of a personal Judas device, betraying you behind your back - what I want to know is what Apple was going to do with the data to get its 30 pieces of silver.

I understand it only works on iOS 4, not 3.x, and works on the iPad too. A few other factoids from Andy:

- This database isn’t storing GPS data. It’s just making a rough location fix based on nearby cell towers. The database can’t reveal where you were…only that you were in a certain vicinity. Sometimes it’s miles and miles off. This implies that the logfile’s purpose is to track the performance of the phone and the network, and not the movements of the user.
- A third party couldn’t get access to this file without physical access to your computer or your iPhone. Not unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and didn’t bother resetting its remote-access password…or there’s an unpatched exploit that would give Random Person On The Internet root access to your phone.
- It’s pretty much a non-issue if you’ve clicked the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” option in iTunes. Even with physical access to your desktop, a no-goodnik wouldn’t be able to access the logfile.

But still! What a nervous can of worms. This is an open, unlocked file in a known location in a standard database format that anybody can read. If someone has physical access to your Mac — or remote access to your user account — it’s a simple matter of copying a file and opening it. And while the logfile can’t tell someone that you were at a specific house, it can obviously tell your boss that you went to the Cape on the day you called in sick.

In other words it is using the same technology all phones use for snooping, but it is storing it insecurely (And a Third Party attack is the most common security flaw) On the BBC news today we heard that there will probably be a rush to subpoena iPhones in all sorts of divorce and crime cases. You have been warned.....