iPhone Tracking and Recording Your Movements

Attention: You are being watched.

By whom and for what reason is undetermined, but data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have discovered a tracking file within devices that operate on iOS 4.

The file is called consolidated.db, and is completely unencrypted and unprotected.  The file can be accessed on the device itself and it also appears on any computer with which the device has been synched.  Apparently, the tracking began with the iOS 4 update.

The file contains latitude and longitude coordinates along with timestamps, which is basically all you need to track someone’s movements along any given time-frame.  According to Allan, there can be up to tens of thousands of data points in any one consolidated.db file which could track movements back to around one year ago.

The research found no evidence to suggest that this information is leaving the devices, so it is only available on the devices themselves and any computer that has synched with it.

Allan and Warden are set to reveal their findings today at the Where 2.0 location conference in Santa Clara, CA.

Here is a video about the discovery of the tracking file:

So…uh…privacy, anyone?  As of right now, it looks like the moral of this story is simply don’t lose your phone.  Also, it’s not like geo-tracking logs aren’t already kept on everyone.  Mobile providers have this data, but its protected and requires court orders to access.  The scary thing about this find, for some, would be the relative ease with which the data is accessible.

Plus, if you are a Foursquare user or check-in on an similar tracking app, your movements are already out there for the world to see.  The difference is that those are opt-in services, while this was happening in secret, unbeknownst to Apple users everywhere.

The two finders have also created a program that allow users to look at their own tracking data on a map.  You can download said program here.  It’ll look like this:

Washington DC to New York from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

All I know is it is getting pretty tough to be a cheater or a criminal these days.

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