[DBMandrake]

I know this is the guardian, but it does seem legitimate:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

Apparently a researcher has discovered that the iPhone since iOS 4 permanently logs location and time stamp data within an internal SQL Lite database, and this database gets backed up to your PC/Mac as part of the iTunes backup process. So far they don't believe it is sent back to Apple, but it does mean anyone with access to your computer can get detailed location history from the backed up file using now available software.

What's unclear is whether it is just logging location data and time stamp at times when the user is opening an app which legitimately asks for location, or whether this location gathering is going on in the background while travelling even when the phone is locked. (For example using the new "location change" API introduced in iOS 4.0)

The original authors page with a copy of the application to open the database is here:

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

Mac only at the moment, so could someone with a Mac try this out before it gets Slashdotted, and see how extensive the location data is from their own iPhone ?

Edit: Here's a more informative story than the original guardian article:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/20/your-iphone-is-silently-and-constantly-logging-your-location/

It would appear from this second article that location information is based on cell tower triangulation, but is logged frequently in the background even when no apps are being used. If that's really the case it could certainly explain some of the battery life issues some people report with recent versions of iOS :p

[Ben]

It's a curious situation, isn't it. Seems a little surplus to requirements to go about logging location data all the time when it's not needed.

I think the big question for Apple is: Why?

[Hands0n]

This could well turn out to be a rather massive own goal for Apple. People will not like this one little bit, regardless of whether they have something to hide or not. Unsolicited location gathering, particularly with the potential to harvest it from a stolen device or the PC/Mac with which it syncs, is an Orwellian horror story come true. Particularly so because the data can be altered once harvested. There are no safeguards against that. And then injected back into the device. So one could imagine that, for whatever reasons, the file could be accessed from the iPhone, modified, reinserted and subsequently used to "prove" that a person was at a certain location at a certain time.

It couldn't happen? Why not? Its not all Hollywood movies :)

If I were Google, right about now, I would be fully engaging my marketing team.

And we all thought Google were evil :P