Is Your iPhone Stalking You? Move By Move Tracking Puts Liberty In Danger

[mawilson 2,133]

But it has a built in hidden camera and watches what you do in the bathroom.

Wouldn't that be cool?!

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Here are a couple. Lot's of fanboys at Mac Rumors, but you can find some good users there too.

http://www.macrumors.com/

http://www.9to5mac.com/

Wouldn't that be cool?!

Steve is a closet voyeur.

Even the government is getting involved now.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/senator-questions-apple-in-wake-of-ios-tracking-scandal.ars

[Zero Sum 305]

Its probably a good idea to give users the option to not be tracked like this, even if by 'fluke.'

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Its probably a good idea to give users the option to not be tracked like this, even if by 'fluke.'

I'm sure they have known about it all along. It just came out now.

[Zero Sum 305]

I'm sure they have known about it all along. It just came out now.

Its common sense they would know it. Its no big leap that cell phones have been traceable for years. And I remember hearing about this as early as two years ago from the iPhone camp.

[mawilson 2,133]

If it's ok for Verizon or Sprint to track you, why not for Apple?

[Peikko 1,575]

Paul is obsessed by Apple for some reason. I think it's a love/hate relationship.

[Zero Sum 305]

This site will allow you to locate your own usage locations using a program developed for this lookup. I will try this on my PC to see if I can locate my WiFi data from my iPad. I have not tried it yet.

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

[Zero Sum 305]

From that link, for those of us not on OSX machines:

How can I examine the data without running the application?

It will be stored in a folder inside /Users/<your user name>/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups/. Each time you sync up an iOS device (iPad, iPhone, etc) files will be copied into a new folder here. The names of the folders and the files within them are mostly random strings, but there are some index files like Info.plist and Manifest.mbdb. Find the folder that has the most recent backup by looking at the modified dates of the files. Then, load Info.plist into a text editor to see what device it's for. You should see a 'Device Name' value in the XML, make sure that it matches your iPhone.

The Manifest.mbdb and Manifest.mbdx files contain a listing of the real names of the files represented by random strings in that folder. Luckily, Alasdair found a Python script here that can convert those:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3085153/how-to-parse-the-manifest-mbdb-file-in-an-ios-4-0-itunes-backup

If you cd into the folder in the terminal, and run iphonels.py you'll see a listing of all the files with their real names. Now, pipe it through grep to find the file we want, eg:

~/Downloads/iphonels.py | grep "consolidated"

You should see something like this:

-rw-r--r-- 00000000 00000000 28082176 1297319654 1297319654 1282888290 (4096c9ec676f2847dc283405900e284a7c815836)RootDomain::Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db

That text in brackets just before 'RootDomain::' is the name of the actual file on disk that holds the location data. Since it's an SQLite database file, you can use any standard SQLite browser, I'm using this Firefox plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/

Open up the file, choose the 'CellLocation' table, and you can browse the tens of thousands of points that it has collected. The most interesting data is the latitude, longitude location and the timestamp. The timestamp shows the time in seconds since January 1st 2001.

A bit too technical for me right now.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

and sheep like you will be placed in the gas chamber.

As I said, if you'd have read the article, you'd see that turning off GPS is irrelevant.

The gas chamber. Right... give over Paul for God's sake. You're turning into Boo-Yah

[mawilson 2,133]

-rw-r--r-- 00000000 00000000 28082176 1297319654 1297319654 1282888290 (4096c9ec676f2847dc283405900e284a7c815836)RootDomain::Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db

Look at the size of that thing... sheesh.

[Zero Sum 305]

Is Boo-Yah the BY I've seen referenced here?

Look at the size of that thing... sheesh.

You can get around that if you have a Mac and just run the application... look at the components of the file ( = GPS coordinates LOL )

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Is Boo-Yah the BY I've seen referenced here?

You can get around that if you have a Mac and just run the application... look at the components of the file ( = GPS coordinates LOL )

Since you are actually a sock puppet, you should know who BY is.

[SuperDuper! 230]

Well the truth is, cell phone carriers have been tracking their users for decades.

It's not really new. If you don't want to be tracked, don't use a cell phone.

Once again, Mark is spot on (while P. is getting fitted for a tin foil hat)

[Zero Sum 305]

Since you are actually a sock puppet, you should know who BY is.

? I thought we got over that.

Start a who is thread if you like.

Paul was partially right about the setting turn off deal with GPS by the way. I spoke today to my AT&T friends again and they confirmed the tech fluke independent of the GPS service. Hopefully I can access the database file soon to map my iPod since I feel it wonders off sometimes.