[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, “iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!“, with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]
[UPDATE: I’ve taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database’s CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I’ve made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]
My posting on my investigations into the content of the consolidated.db file on the iPhone has gotten some 40,000 views, so far, thanks to the magic of Slashdot. There have been a couple of worthwhile items that came up in comments, and I wanted to collect them into a follow-up posting here.
First, Alex Levinson, a researcher who’s done academic work on iOS forensics, posted an excellent column on this which probably deserved to make it to Slashdot more than mine did. It turns out that the existence of this file was not only known, but mentioned in Sean Morrisey’s book on iOS forensics, to which Alex was a contributor.
Second, even without a handy database of what is increasingly appearing to be cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations, people should be aware that their cell phone—as a simple consequence of its operation—”tracks” their movements, simply to enable the hand-off of the phone from one cel tower to the next. Your carrier maintains this information for some period of time, and will provide it to law enforcement in response to an appropriate subpoena.
Interestingly, a German politician, Malte Spitz, sued his carrier, Deutsche Telekomm, to get a copy of the records that they had maintained on him, and discovered that, between August 2009 and February 2010, they had recorded his geographical location some 35,000 times. Zeit Online has a fascinating visualization of Mr. Spitz’s movement and activities developed from this data.
Finally, and sadly, Brian Chen over at Wired has a follow-on to his original column where he gets off to a bad start by noting that people had been “spooked” by the revelation of the existence of this file on their iPhones, but without noting that it was his own headline the previous day—which claimed that iPhones were “tracking [their owners’] every move”, inaccurately as it turns out—which engendered a lot of the “spooking”.
If you’re concerned about this file’s being backed up to your desktop, I’d recommend that you turn on encrypted backups, which can be accomplished through iTunes, as this posting on Techland explains. I still haven’t got the slightest idea why people would be particularly worried about thieves getting this particular file off their desktops, but not (apparently) concerned about their address books, their email archives, their document folders or their calendars.
People are strange.
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