Apple puts the blame for iPhone tracking file on a bug

After triggering privacy concerns across the word over a hidden iPhone feature that was discovered that tracks user data, Apple has finally responded to the queries through an “Apple Q&A on Location Data”.

Apple admits that users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

Answering a question, ‘Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?’, Apple says that this data is not the iPhone’s location data but a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a ‘bug’ we uncovered and plan to fix shortly. Apple says that it doesn’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

But why does Apple store this data at all? According to the iPhone vendor, the iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

Apple also says that when you turn off Location Services, your iPhone might still continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database as this a part of the bug in the software, which the company plans to fix shortly.

Apple also admits that its iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. However, it insists that location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

Without giving a specific date for the fix to this bug, Apple says it’ll release a free iOS software update that:

reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,

• ceases backing up this cache, and
• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Samsung strikes back: lawsuits against Apple in South Korea, Japan and Germany

A week after Apple’s intellectual property infringement suit against Samsung in the US, the South Korean electronics giant has fired back. Samsung Electronics said it is suing Apple Inc. for patent rights violations.

AP has reported that Samsung is accusing Apple of violating its rights to 10 smartphone and computer patents. The company filed lawsuits in Seoul, Tokyo and Mannheim, Germany.

The lawsuits come only days after Apple sued Samsung in a California court. Apple alleges Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones and tablet computers copy Apple’s popular iPad and iPhone.

Samsung is a major patent holder. Post Apple’s allegations against Samsung, Bloomberg last week quoted a Samsung spokesman as saying that “Samsung will respond actively to this legal action taken against the Korean company”. The Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama) reported that another Samsung spokesman said over the phone that they believe “Apple has violated [Samsung] patents in communications standards” and that Samsung is “considering a counterclaim.” Instead of playing defensive, Samsung is using Apple’s own arsenal to fight back.

The lawsuits are the latest in a long string of patent disputes among phone makers. In recent years Apple, Microsoft Corp., Nokia Corp., HTC Corp. and others have taken legal action to protect their intellectual property rights.

Hidden iPhone feature secretly tracks location

Security researchers have discovered a hidden iPhone feature that secretly tracks and saves the meanderings of the phone – and presumably its owner.

The tracking feature was described in a presentation at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

According to the researchers, Pete Warden, founder of Data Science Toolkit and Alasdair Allan, a researcher at Exeter University in the UK, the tracking feature, they started poking around in the backups on the Mac and stumbled on a director called LocationD.

Inside that the researchers found something called “consolidated.db,” an SQL log file containing latitudes, longitudes and cell IDs. Backup data isn’t stored in clear text, but can be parsed using a so-called manifest file.

After the researchers unpacked the data, they found it contained an year’s worth of data showing every cell tower the phone connected to since the phone was upgraded to iOS 4.

The file appears to have been stored locally, only, not shared back to Apple’s servers. However, it is retained even when the iPhone hardware is upgraded.

“My original iOS device was a 3GS and since then I’ve been through two iPhone 4, and this data set persists, Allan noted.

The data was significant: on average 100 data points a day.

The researchers also found that the file contained 220,000 wireless data points with time stamps, the Wifi Mac address and approximate latitude and longitudes of the Wifi access points – those readings are notoriously unreliable for access points.

It is unclear what Apple intended to do with the file, but other data is being tracked as well, including a log on when the user activated the phone’s GPS or compass applications. Recording, for example, every time the phone’s user was “lost,” Warden hypothesized. The phones are also storing geofencing data, a feature that allows phones to receive alerts and notifications when entering or leaving defined geographic areas.

The researchers have also created an open source application that anyone can download and use to examine this data.