Visualize your iPhone's location tracking map in 100% client-side Javascript
markolson.github.com
markolson.github.com
For me, the data shows a lot of where I've been, but with only the sort of accuracy (and errors) you'd expect from tower triangulation.
It also misses some places that I frequent entirely (eg: it has almost no hits near my weekend house or some of the local places there my wife and I visit). Similarly shows no hits in the Pacific Northwest for me, but did seem to track my Vegas and Santa Barbara trips pretty well (though again with highly scattered accuracy).
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having trouble feeling very "violated" by this. If you were to look at my map, I think you could tell the area of the country where I live/work, but probably couldn't pick out my house or office with much accuracy (unless there are underlying timestamps the map doesn't show).
There is often erronous data in there too - that's not this script, that's just that location fixes are inexact.
The real violation is that you just drag-dropped your whole iphone backup to a script written by people you don't know and running on servers you don't control... but don't worry, we don't care to profile you or sell you data... ;)
Yeah, I guess. I just did a quick strings on the backup files, and you could extract a fair bit of info, but it didn't seem like there was much in there that was truly juicy.
I figured the data would be kind of rough, but for a month of my data in NYC it is just off. Apparently I spent most of my time in Bed Stuy and no time in my apartment in Park Slope. It also got Charlottesville, VA confused with Las Vegas. If that actually happened, there must be some great party stories that I haven't been told about yet.
I think the initial app's way of presenting the data has merit because it does hide the swarm of identical points, but it also does make it 'feel' more accurate when you look at it because 'Yes! I live in that circle.' There's sure to be a happy middle ground somewhere.
But point taken, many will use this bit of power js without wven thinking of the consequences...
We wrote this for fun, and to show clientside js apps can do fancy things like parsing sqlite btree dbs raw, despite the obvious privacy implications.
My comment was more of a reflection of people's amusingly conflicting views. One thing this has made me realise though is that if Apple were to just ask their customers rather than operate with subterfuge then they could have avoided this whole thing being a problem.
Not everyone backs up their phone regularly, but those with jailbroken phones can easily grab the database file over ssh.
Some points even show up in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, which doesn't make sense if this is showing cell towers.
Is there a limit on your plotting points? If so, I'd do a geographic sampling to get a good representation of my phone's life.
The script shows what's there, and isn't trying to be the cleverst visualizer I'm afraid