Your iPhone maps and logs where you are and when you're there | Hacker News Reader

Your iPhone maps and logs where you are and when you're there

codefellows.org

34 pointsmikeyanderson30 comments

Not news, and also not news, it's easily disabled. Besides, all this shows is that the phone knows, and there are actual uses for it that make me leave it on, like predicting how long it will take to get home or common places I go. As for it's use in advertising, that can be reset as well as opposed to disabled, so I reset that periodically.

Also, this isn't unique to iPhone, [1] and hasn't been since it was discovered on Android as well.

1. http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/04/21/its-not-just-the-iph...

Everyone that I showed this screen to on their own phone hadn't ever seen that it existed. It's one thing for the phone to log it in some database. It's another that anyone could pick up your phone and see where you live, work, what time you come home, etc.

it'd be awfully tough for them to just go to the Contacts app, pull up your card and see your address :(

Use a passcode for goodness sake! Actively protect your data!

Passcodes are easily bypassed. Buy an XRY and you can get into any phone.

http://www.msab.com

Same way the police do it.

Modern iPhones are entirely encrypted while locked. The key resides in a crypto processor and is irreversibly destroyed during a brute-force attempt (provided you have this turned on).

These devices need certain plists from the phone's trusted iTunes library (if it even has one) to "break" into modern iPhones.

(Some) Android phones might be vulnerable to these though.

If someone can see this screen, they have access to your email. Did you disable email too?

E-mail isn't something that just happens automatically on your phone, you have to set it up, and thus you know it's there and are making a conscious decision that the privacy risks outweigh the value of the service.

Starting with iOS 7, passcode setup happens on first boot. If someone chooses not to put a basic lock on their device (leaving this info vulnerable) then there's much more valuable data that's also exposed.

"Your iPhone maps and logs where you are and when you're there" ... only after asking if you want to enable location services when you get a new phone. That's not exactly "on by default".

Hasn't this been known for quite some time? Here's an article from 2011: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/iphone-tracks/

There's a big difference between a data file hiding somewhere and a full on UI with logs and maps that anyone could pick up your phone and see. Everyone I've showed this too was surprised.

A big difference with this over Google (or NSA for that matter) is the location history stays on your phone and isn't logged on a server.

I believe when I first looked at it, the option to store on their server was turned on. But also people are carrying around a subpoena-ble log of everywhere they've been without knowing.

Was this ever a secret? I thought this was a relatively prominently advertised feature in iOS 7.

This has been "known" for a long time, but not known widely enough that I see it turned off when I ask my friends with iPhones about their data.

Typically the first thing I do is ask them if they want targeted ads pushed to them based on their location and they say "no" and I proceed to borrow their phone and disable everything buried in that menu under Privacy except (perhaps) the compass calibration.

How clever of them to "bury" all the privacy settings in a Settings menu called "Privacy".

Up until iOS7, the ad-tracking settings were under:

"Settings" -> "General" -> "About" -> "Advertising" and not with the rest under "Privacy".

And then they helpfully used a double-negative when describing the behavior of the function, the default state was: "Limit Ad Tracking -- Off"

Apple are far too good with usability for either of those choices to be accidental.

So why change it in iOS 7 if they are out to "bury" it and trick people?

"Apple is far to good to do X" is not a strong argument. They can and do make mistakes all over the place including their strongest areas.

I applaud the move to the "Privacy" context menu, however you must also consider that in addition to the "Advertising" menu at the bottom, there is also a "System Services" sub-menu located at the bottom of Location Services which delivers location-based ads, diagnostics and usage, frequent locations, and "popular near me" settings. These were not exactly called out before the iOS7 update, and nobody reads the ToS so I was disappointed to see it buried so deeply given the focus on privacy with the new menu.

Unlike the NSA, I actually see some personal benefit to this.

I agree too. I like being able to pull down my notification center and have it know where I usually go to provide relevant traffic alerts.

I know this has been discussed many times since the iOS 7 beta builds first release, but recently there has been a nice interface Google has released to see this data from your google account. Uses anything logged in with your google account (phone, computer, tablet, etc) and puts it in one central area.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/

This interface has actually been in existence (in one form or another) since Latitude first launched.

Isn't this basically one use of the motion co-processor collected data that's a feature in the iPhone 5s?

My iPhone doesn't have Preferences, it has Settings. What kind of iPhone is he using?

Ok, it's under Settings > Privacy. Odd mistake to make. When you get there, there's a Clear History option, so I guess if you've been to evil places lately, you can clear your tracks. Mine has been on forever and I don't believe an ad has ever been pushed to me, location-aware or not.

I seem to make that mistake often when explaining where something is. Perhaps its due to iOS's counterpart, OS X, having 'System Preferences'.

Now if I could only find the switch to stop the NSA from tracking me.

Creepy! What kind of evil things could be done with this data?

holy sh*t they stole it from android!

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