iPhoneTracker: See a Map of Where You Have Been

Yesterday, via Ars Technica, I found out about iPhoneTracker, a free application that snoops into your iPhone backups and visually displays a record of your movements. The app is at the center of some controversy, because unbeknownst to most iPhone users, Apple has been collecting data about our whereabouts via cell tower triangulation. While this kind of information has been used by cell companies for some time now “to improve their network,” and has been made available to law enforcement with a warrant, the data has not been so accessible to users until iOS 4 came out.

Data is collected and stored on the iPhone in an unencrypted file called consolidated.db. The file contains information like latitude, longitude, and timestamps that can be used to determine where you have been and when you were there. You can gain access to the file through the iPhone backup file created by iTunes. Because the file is not encrypted, it’s fairly easy to get to the data, which poses a security risk for iPhone users. To get a little more protection, you can encrypt the iPhone backups iTunes stores on your computer, but this still won’t protect the data on your iPhone. Malicious apps, websites, and hacks on could potentially extract the information straight from your iPhone.

My Tour Map… According to My iPhone 4

Security risks aside, I was hoping I could get a nice little map of all my travels from the iPhoneTracker program. Here’s a screen grab of the results it pulled up for me, which ranges from about a year ago to today.

You can see where my tours have taken me over the past year. While some of the data is erroneous (cell tower triangulation is a not fool-proof method for geolocation), the map gives a decent overview of where I’ve been. Is your hometown not on this map? Want me to come play in your area? Let me know!

Updates

Alex Levinson, an information security engineer, posted this informative article: 3 Major Issues with the Latest iPhone Tracking “Discovery”.

Gawker says: Apple Patent Reveals Extensive Stalking Plans.

Apple’s Fix

Looks like this location tracking problem is fixed in the 4.3.3 update. Problem over?