Comms: iPhone location recorder discovered

Mobile phone location software is nothing new. It's been used by companies to track salesmen to see how often they are off on a frolic of their own or how long they stay with a customer, it's been used to provide real-time data on the location of lorries so as to monitor drivers' hours, traffic conditions and to track a vehicle in case of theft or hijack. Readily available (and cheap) software can be embedded in a phone to spy on its user - not just as to location but to record (and even secretly transmit) SMS and call records.

And Android users, in particular, are used to using their Location app to find out where they are, using either cellphone towers or GPS as a data source.

But all of these things are things that someone has to install and switch on. Until yesterday, few people knew that the default setting of a smart-phone or tablet computer might be to record a history of the movement of a device.

Researchers at the University of Exeter in England have found that Apple's software upgrade for iOS a year ago included a location tracker / recorder for which the default setting is on if the device is equipped for 3G. That's all iPhones and most iPads.

Alasdair Allan is not a computer chap, as such. He's a Senior Research Fellow in astronomy. He released his findings with journalist Pete Warden at a conference about location software, called Where 2.0, organised by O'Reilly.

Allan says that he has not found any evidence that the collected data is used in any way except stored on the device. That includes that it is not being sent anywhere, including back to Apple.

But the data is not encrypted. That means that anyone who has access to a third party's iPhone, etc, - or a computer to which the iPhone user backs up data (e.g. as part of the iTunes auto-backup system) - can access the location data.

The tracking does not affect OS versions prior to iOS4.0, say Allan and Warden. They acknowledge that a French researcher Paul Courbis identified the issue shortly after iOS4.0 was released and he produced a tool that would link to Google Maps and plot up to 10,000 locations. But that tool was not widely known and is regarded as a bit geeky. It's also hardly likely to have received much attention in the USA because most of the information relating to it is in French (http://www.courbis.fr/Localisation-iPhone-votre.html)

According to Allen and Warden, the recording system in the iOS stores tracking information - together with date and time in a database. It's raw data and it's not accessible from other Apps on the devide, they say. But once it's on a PC, it's readily accessible.

Allen and Warden have written an open source program (not an iPhone App) that allows users to view the data plotted against a map. But, they say, they have designed it in such a way that the representation is not as accurate as the raw data. In short, not so much fuzzy logic as fuzzy whereabouts.

That means, they say, that the results might place someone close to but not actually where he was. And in any case, because of the use of triangulation from cell-phones, the location is not as precise as GPS in any case. Indeed, Android Location is often several hundred metres off point - which is not a lot of use if you want to send your location to a friend and say "come and find me).

But it is extremely important if someone steals your data and wants to place you in a particular location at a particular time.

When Apple introduced iOS4, it changed its terms and conditions including to "collect, use and share" any location data at any time, including "real time geographic location of your Apple computer or device." Although they say they will not collect user-specific data, it says "we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt into their location services."

That makes a great deal of sense, the way social networking is going. Indeed, Android users (sorry to bore those with other things) have an OS- App that specifically allows real-time group sharing of location - and it's accurate to within a couple of hundred metres.iPhone users can download similar services from the App Store. It's a short step from that to including details of (e.g. adverts for) local attractions, etc.

Unlike with Android, the Apple location software cannot be turned off: it's part of the OS and (unlike Android) Apple users don't get to choose which parts of the OS or embedded applications they launch or kill. Under Android, location data is used in real time and not stored for retrospective analysis - so far as we have been able to find out today.