After Wednesday’s revelation that iPhones have been storing location data since iOS 4.0, now it’s time for the fallout. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was concerned enough about it to send Apple a letter, asking how and why this happened.
In the letter (full text here), Franken wants to know why Apple collected and compiled this data, why it wasn’t encrypted, whether it’s compiled on laptops, how it’s generated, how frequently the location data is recorded, how precise it is, who’s using the data and why consumers weren’t told about it.
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Adding to this congressional inquiry was Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who is co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus. He wrote his own letter to Apple, asking “Is it an iPhone or an iTrack? Apple needs to safeguard the personal location information to ensure that an iPhone doesn’t become an iTrack.”
Why did Apple do this? Respected Apple watcher John Gruber writes in his Daring Fireball blog that he doesn’t have a definitive answer, but says he has some insider information about the location tracking on the iPhone, calling it “an oversight” on the part of Apple:
“…my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.”
Apple still hasn’t commented about that location-tracking consolidated.db file.
There is a fix for the problem now, but only if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone. An app called Untrackerd made a surprisingly quick appearance on Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones, and according to 9 to 5 Mac, will remove that location data and prevent more from being recorded.
Meanwhile, tech guru Andy Ihnatko downplayed the damage done by the tracking file, pointing out that it’s not storing GPS data, but less-precise cellphone tower triangulation data that only reveals “that you were in a certain vicinity.” He adds that the consolidated.db file is inaccessible unless someone possess both your iPhone and your computer. Finally, he says it’s “a non-issue if you’ve clicked the ‘Encrypt iPhone Backup’ option in iTunes.”
We’re expecting to see a response from Apple soon, and we’re hoping for a fix (that doesn’t require jailbreaking) that will give users the ability to turn off this tracking and delete its data.
