A privacy storm has blown up over the revelation (if that is the right word) that iPhones and 3G iPads keeps data on the movements of their owners, which is backed up to personal computers when the devices are synchronised.
Al Franken, the Minnesota senator, has already complained about this fact, pointing out that:
“Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of the user’s home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend and the trips he has taken over the past months or even a year.”
Two researchers announced their findings on iPhone tracking data at a conference on Wednesday, only to be criticised by another one on the grounds that they were not saying anything new.
But the rebuttal by Alex Levinson, an information security engineer, buried the story. Well down his long explanation of why the data stays on the device and is not uploaded to Apple, he included the following bit of tech-speak:
Through my work with various law enforcement agencies, we’ve used h-cells.plist on devices older than iOS 4 to harvest geolocational evidence from iOS devices.
Hold it right there. In other words, iPhones are already being used by the police to locate where their owners have been over the previous few days and weeks. That will come as a surprise to a lot of people.
Bobbie Johnson of GigaOm noted this point and asked Mr Levinson about it. He claims that he has “worked with “multiple state and federal agencies both in the US and internationally”.
So now we know.
