iPhone Tracks Your Location Data Continually And Stores It On Your Computer!

iPhone Tracks Your Location Data Continually And Stores It On Your Computer!
Posted by dkszone on April 20, 2011
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A security research on iPhone has revealed some shocking details of a secret file which stores all your location information, including latitude and longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. The researchers also found that this file gets synchronized via iTunes whenever you connect your iPhone to your Computer.

Which means if anyone gets their hands on your iPhone (after jailbreaking it) or your Personal Computer, they get access to all your movements, maybe over the past year or so. Worse is that this file is not encrypted, it can be read by anyone in clear text with no special software or hardware.

One of the researchers, Pete Warden has put up an application called iPhoneTracker for Mac OS X that can extract the location database and map all your movements. If you are curious to know what your iPhone has recorded so far, then go ahead and download the application from this github site.



According to the researchers, this secret file on iPhone is not sent back to Apple’s servers, only stored locally. Mobile networks do track your location, but this is made available only to Government Authorities at the behest of a court order.

As of now there is no official response from Apple on this finding. Why would Apple simply want to store location data when they have no plans of sending it back to their servers? Would this be for a geo targeted advertising? Or some upcoming feature in iOS 5?

Whatever maybe the reason, any one who owns an iPhone is definitely not going to feel the same way about their privacy and security as before. Apple has breached user’s security by withholding information on this secret tracking.