iPhone spying on owners

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/technology-13145562?psdata=11_3_x10_xCD11__CK12_15_4CXh

I'm surprised this hasn't been done yet as there are a few of us here.
I can't make out if the info is only stored if you sync with an Apple
computer.

 

Just a tick, let me just take a wild guess...

What's the problem, it's seems to be in the T&Cs, so forget about it. Who cares
if Steve knows where you are, he's about to pop his clogs anyway.

 

Steve doesn't know where you are - it appears that the data isn't
uploaded from the local device/synchost.

 

It's not. Not yet !

 

Blimey, a) That's a first, and b) What's the bloody point then?

 

Good question - I've pondered the same.

 

When Lawren Forcement wants to know where you *were* on the day in
question. Unhappily for them, it seems the data is less than reliable.

 

That data could be retrieved from the Mobile Networks. Regardless of
which, the location of the phone would be, at best, circumstantial
evidence as to the location of you.

 

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

 

I'm pretty sure that all 'smartphones' will do this, and will have been
doing it for years.

 

Why would they?

 

And you don't think that can't be found out from any mobile on any
network already?

 

But why does anyone care? If someone gets hold of my phone or my
laptop, they can find out a hell of a lot more about me than simply
where I've been.

And as you know, mobile networks know that about me anyway.

It's a complete non-issue, and Apple have had it in the T&Cs for the
iPhone since year dot.

 

Up to a point. The networks are supposed to look after it and only fessup when
presented with proper legal documents. Outside this, lets say it was being
uplinked, and I, as a fare paying customer of Steve had access to it, and I knew
you lived in Cambridge, but appeared to be in Scotland. Now, I might like to
take a little drive in my Transit van.

 

As it stands, no-one has said or proven that the data is being uploaded
anywhere. Therefore you would need the phone or synchost of the phone
owner/user in order to access the data.

 

Of course it can. You think I don't take the battery out when I'm on a
bank... er, as you were.

 

How long before some aspiring scrote finds a way of hacking it?

 

Hacking what? If you mean accessing the data and plotting it on a map
to show where your phone has been and when, then it's already been done.

However, you need *access* to the data, and that is only stored in two
places 1) on the phone 2) on the device the phone syncs with.

So unless you have my phone, or the particular hard drive that hosts my
iTunes account - you're SOL. To get the data without physically having
those devices would meancreating some sort of trojan that knows what to
look for and where to look for it, then getting that trojan past me,
and then enabling it to relay the information back to you without me
knowing.

Possible? Yes. Probable? No.

 

Excuse my ignorance but isn't all this fuss about the very fact that we do
know exactly what to look for and where it lives.

You are a user, getting past you (for multiple values of sun reading mouth
breathing twitter using targets) is far too easy. The technical tricks
might take some skills but once that door is open....

....this statement becomes utter fucking bollox.

 

There are at least 7 hard drives, some with several partitions in this
house - so, how do you know which one to hit?

Haha. Perhaps, for many users, but certainly not for me and many other users.