Big Brother Is Watching You with iPhones
NPR has a crazy fucking story.
Quote:
Researchers at the University of Exeter discovered that iPhones using the latest operating system keeps detailed records of where you've been.
At the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Peter Warden, of Data Science Toolkit, and Alasdair Allan, a researcher at University of Exeter, said they were looking to visualize information on phones. It might reveal things you didn't even know you were carrying around said Warden.
On their iPhones, they found a file simply titled "consolidated.db" and it had a series of latitude and longitudes. Perhaps, the researchers thought, the phone would store a week's worth of locations for the pictures they had taken. Then they took the data and put it on a map and were surprised with what they found.
"It turned out to be pretty much a year's worth of data for every cell [tower] that we've been through since we upgraded to iOS4," said Warden.
Credit goes to Josh for posting this on Facebook. I don't know why he didn't post it here, though. Shit is nuts.