Category Archives: iPhone

The Apple spyPhone

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Oxford to Cambridge and then London from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

Fascinating video of location data routinely and covertly gathered by an iPhone belonging to research Alasdair Allen. I came on it via an intriguing Guardian story which reported that

Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010.

“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been,” said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Only the iPhone records the user’s location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google’s] Android phones and couldn’t find any,” said Warden. “We haven’t come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this.”

Lots more information (plus a downloadable open source application that enables you to locate the file containing your location data history) on Pete Warden’s site. He’s got some helpful FAQs, including these:

What can I do to remove this data?

This database of your locations is stored on your iPhone as well as in any of the automatic backups that are made when you sync it with iTunes. One thing that will help is choosing encrypted backups, since that will prevent other users or programs on your machine from viewing the data, but there will still be a copy on your device.

Why is Apple collecting this information?

It’s unclear. One guess might be that they have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that’s pure speculation. The fact that it’s transferred across devices when you restore or migrate is evidence the data-gathering isn’t accidental.

Is Apple storing this information elsewhere?

There’s no evidence that it’s being transmitted beyond your device and any machines you sync it with.

What’s so bad about this?

The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in an easily-readable form on your machine. Any other program you run or user with access to your machine can look through it.

It’s interesting that the mobile operators also keep this data, but the cops have to get a special order to access it. (Which they often do, as we find out in evidence to murder trials, for example.) But anyone who gets access to an iPhone (or, it turns out, a 3G-enabled iPad) can get it without going through any legal palaver.

Interesting, ne c’est pas? n’est-ce pas?

(Thanks to Duncan Thomas for correcting my French.)

Apple’s Suez canal

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This morning’s Observer column.

At the centre of the Appleverse sits a single, crucial piece of desktop software – iTunes. You can do very little with an Apple device without hooking it up to iTunes. Until now, this has given Apple a key strategic advantage over all other competitors. But, as Britain discovered with the Suez canal in the 1950s, being unduly dependent on a single strategic asset can also have serious downsides.

The problem is that iTunes is now a pretty ancient piece of software. When it first appeared in 2001 as a reworking of SoundJam, a program Apple bought from a Californian company in 1999, it provided an elegant way of doing just one thing: getting songs from CDs on to your computer’s hard drive. But over the years, more and more functions have been added: first the management of iPods, then the Apple online store. Then iTunes became the conduit for managing one’s iPhone. The latest addition is the Ping social-networking function.

This is what the industry calls “feature creep” on an heroic scale…

Backwards into the future

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This morning’s Observer column.

It’s not often that a newspaper column can resolve a dispute that has troubled the finest minds of an abstruse academic discipline, but hey, what else is the New Review for? The field is cosmology, and the dispute concerns the issue of whether there exist parallel universes that together include “everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them.”

Today we can reveal that at least one such parallel universe exists. It is usually found in Finland, but last week alighted on the ExCel Centre in London, where it was visited by several observers known to this columnist. It is called the Nokiaverse (though some call it Nokia World) and it is populated by people who believe that it is possible to go backwards into the future…

Growing pains

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This morning’s Observer column.

Over the past two months, Apple’s market capitalisation (ie its value as measured by the stock market) averaged out at $229.8bn.

The corresponding figure for Microsoft was $215.9bn. And yes, you read those numbers correctly: Apple is now worth significantly more than Microsoft, and the difference isn’t just a flash in the Wall Street pan.

This has implications for all of us who follow these things. The mainstream media, for example, need to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which they have viewed Apple ever since Steve Jobs returned to the helm in 1997. Apple is no longer the Lucky Little Company That Could but a looming, secretive, manipulative corporate giant.

Recent developments suggest that Apple itself also needs to adjust to its new status as just another company…

Apropos the Microsoft comparison, Randall Stross has a useful piece in today’s NYT. Microsoft continues to be a formidable company, but from the viewpoint of investors it’s become more like GE or Big Oil (excepting BP, perhaps) — a good ‘banker’ stock for a part of one’s pension portfolio.

Why Louis Grey turned In his iPhone and went for Android

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Long, thoughtful post by Louis Gray.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word – "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is "Cloud" – the idea that I don't need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is "Capability". The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there…

Worth reading in full.