dispatches

There’s been a lot of controversy around a blog post on O’Reilly Radar that claims Apple is recording user’s location data, for unknown purposes. I pulled the data from my phone and mapped six months of it.

The red points are from the cellphone table and the blue dots are from the WiFi table. The first thing I noticed is that the data look nothing like my regular spatial pattern, see below. These maps are not the same scale and time period, but you get the general idea. Look for the empty park in the centre of the top map and in the centre, near the top of the bottom map. The map below was recorded with a real GPS.

Here’s another map from a trip to Auckland. My actual location was Auckland Airport, upper-left, where I scampered from the domestic terminal to an international connection. Note the points all over South Auckland.

The timestamps in the database are curious. There are typically dozens or hundreds of records all with the same timestamp. There are a few unique timestamps per day, but there are many days with no data.

So what is this data? While the names of the database fields suggest that this data is a recording of the phone’s position, the authors of the blog post offer no evidence that this is actually the case.

The map from my phone has thousands of WiFi points at locations that I haven’t been near to and the gross pattern of recorded points doesn’t match my travel especially well. Your phone might be able to connect with distant cell towers, and I guess it’s possible that the phone has seen brief scraps of data from all these access points.

I’m wondering if this database is something else. Perhaps it’s a cache of data from a geolocation webservice that the phone can use to determine its position? If it is tracking my location, the positions are wildly inaccurate. You certainly couldn’t determine where I live or work from the data.

Update: Looks like this data is the devices radio logs and geolocation data.

Update: turns out Android phones keep this type of data too.

Update: Apple speaks.

From a privacy point of view, it’s not great that this file is lying around unencrypted. But in terms of disclosing your location, it’s not doing much better than “I was in Christchurch”. My online calendar and emails would be a much more accurate source of this information.

Perhaps the most striking part of this story is the hysterical storm that has swept across the news and social media. Come on, these things are location enabled devices. What did you expect?