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Apple Updating iOS To Address Privacy Concerns
wiredmikey writes "[Apple] said that over the next few weeks it would release a software update for iOS that would reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up the cache, and delete the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. Additionally, Apple said that in the next major iOS software release the cache would be encrypted on the iPhone, though a timeline for that was not provided."
It's been a long week of high-profile fuck-ups.
Not erasing the old logs doesn't seem like a bug.. it would've been caught by a single test case. It seems to be a design decision to cache locations to speed up look ups the next time, so would've been considered a feature. Not encrypting the data, on the other hand, seems to be a genuine oversight. But no wonder they want to call everything a bug, what with the government breathing down their neck with Congressional hearings.
This space for rent.
Apple: We never did anything wrong, but pardon us while we fix it anyway.
Well, this seems like a good response but I think we still saw here that data collection practices for consumers are going in a negative direction.
Overall, this has taught me to simply leave location services off, because the data is being stored on the phone and potentially could be available for data farming in the future.
I'm an iOS developer and am glad this is finally over. I wasn't worried about the security ascpect; I was tired of getting stupid alarmist questions about it.
What about the timestamps? Why does a "crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database" still need timestamps?
Sendou Wave Kick!!
So apple's going to encrypt the location cache on a phone that is otherwise locked, where other people generally don't have access to it other than the device itself, and lower the battery to deal with encryption routines all because people are idiots?
Sigh...
Sounds like Apple is taking steps to improve their system and give the paranoid users a easy opt out. Now the question is what are the other phone manufactures doing with their location systems? Especially those who log your data to the cloud?
Who owns your data?
all this stuff should have been in the product requirements specification since they decided to collect all this data. and some of us more naive folks around even thought it was. so stupid!
My wife and I have 2g and 3g iPhones. Apple began blocking the installation of higher iOS systems at the end of the 3.1.3 and 4.2.2 lines, respectively. Since this is a global liability, will Apple update these old phones as well? Or do they remain an outstanding liability?
The ______ Agenda
fact it ever happened to need fixed as a current problem
Fix your garbage English, it makes your post unintelligible; "need to be fixed" or "need fixing" would be acceptable, but your meaning is still unclear.
Why not use the direct link as nothing was added and some was cut?
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Not erasing the old logs doesn't seem like a bug.. it would've been caught by a single test case.
You only put tests in for problems you think of. Deleting the log file altogether when you turn off location services, is a problem they simply didn't think about. If you think about it the guys writing that part of the code probably assumed that since the file was cached it would be truncated so leaving it around wouldn't matter...
The rest of the time you aren't deleting the file, instead you are periodically truncating it - something beyond a single test case, and requiring a long period of time to elapse. That part seems also like it could easily be oversight.
To my mind they probably just thought keeping a record of cell towers was not a big deal, because it was not an exact location log... although just from a performance aspect you'd think they would not want that file growing too large.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A perfectly sane feature has now been curtailed effectively by public outcry against perceived violation of privacy. While I agree that it is a good thing the stuff now gets encrypted locally (yay, more encryption of sensitive information!) the grand result is nearly nothing. The way this thing worked was by having a cache of locations stored locally and for those who worry about invasion of privacy this turn of events doesn't change anything - if Big Brother wants to know where you are and where you've been, he need do nothing more than to store where you connect from on his side - something he has always been able to do.
Its a global consumer and user behavior monitoring device, with a phone tacked on.
Timeline check:
Article exposes / raises awareness of tracking / trackability.
Immediate shitstorm of Apple Worshipper hue and cry, "Cain't be! Android sucks! Jobs 4eva!"
Cops say, "We use and need this shit to make our lives easier, bitches."
God Jobs says, "And now behold, it is wisdom that this isn't happening. Resist the evil darkness that besmirches the holy name!"
And now the oracles at the temple have issued a proclamation that an update to the scriptures will "fix" this allegedly non-existent gaffe?
Ow! My beloved religion hurts!
p.s. More likely just make it harder to find, override, clear. L.E. will still have their access.
2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite.
A: Because they're idiots.
maybe he's from Pittsburgh they talk that way. It is garbage though.
"Apple said that in the next major iOS software release the cache would be encrypted on the iPhone...."
Encrypted by Apple, so only Apple can only view & use it...!
it's the reason why my wifi only ipad knows exactly where it is just by the wifi access point it's connected to and nearby wifi access points. i thought it was very nice when i opened up the weather channel app for the first time on it and it knew where i was without me putting in a zip code. and it does this whenever i take it with me
I have a question, why collect WiFi hotspot data?
Remember when Google said that its collection of WiFi hotspots as part of Google Maps was "accidental"?
Now we learn that the Android phone is still collecting hotspot data and sending it to Google. Doesn't seem so accidental after all.
Why does any company need this? There is no advertising that is tied to your hotspot/MAC address.
What can they do with that information, and what can law enforcement do with it?
great...how about fixing bluetooth connectivity now?
What's the best way to encrypt the database? Encrypt the row data (encryption is done before updating and decrypted after selecting), or encrypt the entire file (sql statements operate on plaintext)?
What about people who are grabbed by their government? Now there Phone can be checked for locations and those location will be at risk whether or not they aided the dissenter....Know what cell tower you connected to is one thing, know the exact block or store you where in is another.
That's the thing though, it was NOT storing accurate location data. It's cell tower and some WiFi data, generally information you cannot use to tell you were at a specific house or even possibly neighborhood... think 1/4 to 1/2 mile radius, possibly a block but not a store.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't think that people who are worried about their privacy are concerned about being tracked via their cell phone. What privacy advocates are concerned about is the erosion of due process.
Having tracking information on a local device opens the potential for more risk (theft) and abuse (rogue law enforcement). There shouldn't be any reason why any police officer can get that information simply for pulling you over.
This is very simple to understand. No human being should be entitled to your tracking data without a good reason. You must be very naive to trust everyone with such data, which should not be collected in the first place.
And while we're on the subject, the Telco should not be storing your location data. It should be compelled to do so ONLY once a warrant is issued, from which point forward the Telco can begin recording the location of the target - helpful in criminal investigations, for example, or to build a case.
Do you need the minute for that? Isn't the month or week good enough?
If you are driving down the highway you change locations quite a lot in a minute. Knowing a rough rate of travel because of locations of previous data collected over time, you could easily see the iPhone not trusting data even a minute old if it could extrapolate you were recently traveling at high speeds from the other data - or it might tweak location results to give you a location centered around where it thought you might be.
In fact I don't know if minute tracking is good enough, I would have recorded it to the second...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
then the researcher wouldn't have found it, at it would of been a non-issue. :( this doesn't really change anything since most people will keep tracking turned on so they can use some social app that doesn't do much. soon we can go back to living in ignorance while our lives can be tracked and examined.
If you are one, software updates should not bother you. Move on.
From TFA:
3. Why is my iPhone logging my location? The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested.
That is, it's keeping track of known locations near you so it can give you a quicker estimate of your location. Even sounds like this list of locations is downloaded from apple and not gathered by iOS. Why is this so hard for everyone to understand? This is exactly the kind of thing you want your devices to do. If they didn't have it everyone would be bitching about how long it takes for the phone to find your location.
I know, I know, I expect the internets to not be full of fools and trolls.
Sigh.
...orm back to Apple...
Just one problem with the tinfoil on your hat there - no-one is claiming that Apple was ever sent this file.
The issue is that someone might collect that data if they got to your phone or the backup. But not Apple.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My favorite answer:
No, they're just logging the location of things you go near and the time you passed by them. This is not a location the same way that "314 Evergreen Street, Pigsknuckle, Arkansas at 2:31:14am on April 17, 2011" is not a location because it doesn't specify if you're inside or outside the house.
And then, two sentences later...
So they're not tracking your location, just the data needed to triangulate your location. Just like the GPS doesn't track your location, since it also only gives the data needed to triangulate your location.
The data from the GPS is not the location of the receiver, but rather the locations of the satellites surrounding the receiver's location.
This sentence no verb.
Apple said they weren't _using_ your location data, not that they were _storing_ it on your phone. Now they are saying they will stop your phone from storing it and stop iTunes from backing it up to your computer. You Apple haters are spinning this worse than fox news.
This log file has been a known issue for at least 6 months. I'll give Apple credit and say that never purging the contents of the file is a bug, but they have know about the problem and did nothing to correct it.
On top of that, there are professional phone forensic applications that use this exploit to gather the location data off the phone. Police and private investigators have been exploiting this issue long before the recent announcement.
Here are a few articles with more detailed info on it.
It's obviously commendable to remove the "feature", but doing it after the fact is worse than not implementing it in the first place. The wider problem is the "autopsy" approach used here: when something goes wrong, only then analysis and corrections are done. As a consequence, you always need a catastrophic failure in order to drive developments in security. This is the worst possible way to do it. Furthermore, as often in security issues, you'll end up with a whack-a-mole game - which no one necessarily wants to even play - when trying to curb security failures by different companies - of different moral integrities, of course. The only way to solve this is to have legistlation that requires a certain level of security, particularly the security of personal information.
You know, the one who came up with this great "crowd sourcing" idea?
No one? Apple says that they do is items # 3,4,5,8. 5.
From TFA:
Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.
Hi there. reality calling. If they can't tell it's from you, it's not YOUR DATA they are sending.
Bloody tinfoil-hat Apple Haters...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> I expect the internets to not be full of fools and trolls.
then either double, half, or start psychotropic medication.
Apple can probably have you opt-out of AGPS and rely strictly on GPS, although you'll have to get used to waiting outside for 2 minutes for your phone to get a lock on your location. Every. single. time. While those that keep AGPS will lock their location anywhere almost instantly. That's the breaks.
You do realize that is New-Speak, right? If I track the spot 3 feet directly north of you, I AM tracking your location. Previously, it was reported that no location data was being sent to Apple. Now we are supposed to not worry about the data they are collecting, and have said they will continue to collect. Look at the words being used. Clearly Apple is collecting data from your phone, or they could not send a 'subset" of their "crowd sourced" database to you. In response to the question, they tell you what data they are sending in response. They don't talk about what data they are collecting.
Sorry but this is not new speak, it's the truth, there's a clear distinction between your lat/long/error radius and a list of towers and wifi locations that MAY be somewhere near you at a given point in time. To determine your location they need to triangualte at the time. The data in the file is not going to let anyone do that after the fact.
If you opt in (use locations services) then they'll send some data to you to help your device get a faster location fix. +1 IMHO.
I'd assume at this point your device may send helpful data back to them. They state that this data is anonymous. Also +1.
Sorry, but this is all blown way out of proportion. Apple isn't perfect, but the response they have given is quite reasonable.
If I track the spot 3 feet directly north of you, I AM tracking your location.
Not unless the tracking information says that the spot is 3 feet directly in front of you.
It doesn't. The iPhone cache simply says: I last heard this transmitter at this time. The location is retrieved from elsewhere.
The local cache doesn't say anything about where you were in relationship to that transmitter.
Ah, so if I took pictures from all the houses around your house...
SInce it sends locations of cell towers around you, the better analogy is that if someone is taking pictures in the city I live in I'm ok with them sending those pictures off somewhere.
You are just acting as a conduit to confirm reception of a signal, they don't know it's you receiving it.
Good to know...
Now you do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As I tried to point out less than 24 hours ago here, this "feature" is not sane at all. It never was and never will be. Funny how closely Apple came to completely agreeing with my statements less than a day later, especially when saying that they also believe that the phone should not keep this kind of information for more than a maximum of one week.
You and far too many other people fail to realize that it was never "Big Brother" or Apple that made the presence of this information dangerous. Rather, it was and is the potential murderers, stalkers, rapists, thieves, kidnappers and assassins who could use the information for nefarious purposes that make it dangerous. Everyone with a smart phone that keeps this kind of location history is at risk if that information can ever be accessed by a malicious third party (and I'm not talking about advertisers). Keeping the cache limited to 7 days worth of data will help limit the abuse potential while still maintaining the point of keeping the information in the first place, which is to help the phone locate its own position quickly even with faulty or non-existent GPS data.
I, for one, am mildly impressed by the way that Apple is responding to and fixing this issue, although they should have already taken these exact steps a year ago when this type of "tracking" was initially revealed.
However, for WiFi networks, that gets you down to a couple hundred feet at most. Even with a high gain antennae on both ends, facing out windows, I could barely get my WiFi signal to reach the house directly across the street.
There's a big difference between what WiFi networks you can use, vs. what the hardware underneath can detect.. probably 500ft at least. Yes that is a tighter area but when you consider it's a circle it's not enough to say you were in a specific block even (could have been the next block over) AND you don't know how long necessarily someone was there.
I looked at my own log data, from Hong Kong and elsewhere around the world. The practical reality was 1/4 a mile at best, even in major cities which have tons of WiFi connections everywhere.
One thing that adds to this is that it doesn't seem like it stores exact locations of anything, but instead locations on some kind of grid. When you zoom into the location map you don't see discrete points all over so much as a giant grid with points on the grid marked. There is just no way you could use this to determine anything really interesting or provide proof you were in a specific location.
As others have noted if you were law enforcement you'd be way better off going to the cell companies which have tracked you with far greater precision. If it's just some dude who stole your phone he's not going to be able to figure out where you live or work from this data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It doesn't say your location if you can't do math. Those of us who can do math can pinpoint your location from that data pretty easily.
There is nothing that indicates that triangulation cannot be done after the fact. That is just made up. -5
Even if they properly anonymize the data (which is questionable), it is still not OK to sneak data off of the phone owners device without their knowledge. -5
This is not blown out of proportion. Apple is not a company filled with a bunch of bubling idiots. They knew exactly what they were doing, and have stated that they are going to continue. That is not a reasonable response.
What about people with the, now-unsupported, iPhone 3G?
Luckily, Apple has already tackled this by crippling the phone so that, at least in my case, location services are practically unusable.
--
Severely degrading the user experience on the 3G 4.x updates and then discontinuing support has left me feeling betrayed by Apple and, as a result, I am never buying another product from them. This is no different than Sony pulling the Other-OS function from existing PS3s. Fuck you Apple.
I think that parent does a very good analysis of this issue:
This log file has been a known issue for at least 6 months. I'll give Apple credit and say that never purging the contents of the file is a bug, but they have know about the problem and did nothing to correct it.
They probably did nothing about it because it didn't seem like a big deal to them. You want an example of a security issue which has real world impact on tens of thousands of users? Insert latest credit card database theft news here. There seems to be at least one every few months, I think the latest was Sony.
By contrast, a phone which logs the locations of cell towers that it's been near causes next to no real harm to its users. The uproar has been essentially emotional: "ZOMG I'm being TRACKED!!!!", even though the information stays on your phone (and computer, if backed up) and isn't terribly useful to anybody likely to get hold of it. Maybe law enforcement might want to use it to pinpoint where you were if they suspect you of a crime, but they're going to have problems using it due to the nature of what's stored: it merely locates cell towers you were near, not where you actually were, and as soon as you return to a location near the tower they're interested in, the information they need (the timestamp of when the phone last asked for an update about the position of that tower) is destroyed.
Also, it's hard to make a case that LEOs lucking into a way of finding some information about the whereabouts of suspects greatly harms society as a whole. Yes, there's a privacy argument to be made, but what I'm getting at is that on the whole, leaks of CC databases cause real harm to innocents, while this problem almost certainly did not.
In short, assuming Apple had a Radar bug filed, it was probably treated as a low priority since they had no idea that it would become the subject of a media feeding frenzy and inflated into an issue of vastly more importance than it really is.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220110051665%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20110051665&RS=DN/20110051665
The gist of the 26 claims makes it appear that Apple wanted to provide the user with a timestamped "journal" of their travels among other things.
that leads to a blog that summarizes the real article:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html
Like anyone can even know that
ask yourself what you'd be saying if it was Microsoft that had this incident happen to.
I'm pretty sure WM7 DOES have a file like this - who knows what the cache policy is. Android also has a file just like this.
The thing is, there are great technical reason to cache these things across the system and that is why you'll find the same kind of thing on any system. Not only would I not complain but I'd be worried about the technical abilities of companies that did NOT have a file like this somewhere. And the data is so inaccurate that really the fact someone potentially might be able to read it from a backup file, is of no concern to me at all - regardless of platform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just down the road from Apple at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino there is a nice shopping center called The Oaks, right across the road from DeAnza college. In that center there are several old Oak trees. I suggest you take your Iphone there and using a 3 inch gum nail and claw hammer, Nail the Iphone to one of those trees. Then Apple will always be able to find it.
There is nothing that indicates that triangulation cannot be done after the fact. That is just made up. -5
I realize that you have difficulty with basic math, but it's not made up at all. Triangulation requires two types of data:
* Map coordinates for at least 3 known reference points
* Distance measurements from each reference point to the object whose position is to be triangulated
When the phone's close to reference points (cell towers and WiFi base stations), it requests location info on them from a central DB, and caches it locally so that the next time it needs it, it can get it without needing to go over the network. (Improves performance, reduces use of the radio.) That's the file you and others have been up in arms about.
It doesn't cache or store distance measurements. It performs them in real time based on application demand, in order to triangulate in situations where a GPS location fix is unavailable or slow or degraded, but it stores neither the distances measured nor the final location estimate. Triangulation after the fact is therefore impossible.
Even if they properly anonymize the data (which is questionable), it is still not OK to sneak data off of the phone owners device without their knowledge. -5
This is a separate issue from the File of Doom. They've always been open that if you turn Location Services on, they allow the phone to submit anonymized (and why is that questionable in your mind?) position reports for the purpose of bettering their central database. Most likely this takes the form of getting GPS fixes plus signal strength data for WiFi base stations: if you had a bunch of anonymous reports of that information for each known WiFi, it wouldn't be too hard to estimate a good true location for it, which can then be served back up to phones needing a known reference point for triangulation during times when GPS is problematic.
This is not blown out of proportion. Apple is not a company filled with a bunch of bubling idiots. They knew exactly what they were doing, and have stated that they are going to continue. That is not a reasonable response.
Yes, they're going to continue doing that thing which they always disclosed they were doing. That thing which helps them deliver services which their customers desire. One wonders what a reasonable response would be in your mind.
Actually I had been overlooking a key fact - that location database? That's not things around you YOU have found. That's locations from an APPLE DATABASE, sent TO YOU and cached on your phone.
So it's even less accurate than I thought at saying where you were since it's just a big old list of locations of everything probably within a few miles of you. You guys got all worked up for nothing - as per usual.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where do you think the data in consolidated.db came from?
It came from Apple, who created the data set from a mixture of cell phone records of where towers were located, plus anonymous data about where wifi locations were near. Note that almost all the data Apple has was collected long before you ever got there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the people responsible for making the list of files to backup probably thought
The people doing the backup generally only build an exclusion list. They aren't looking for things to back up; that would be insane in a system with hundreds of thousands of files. They must be told what to explicitly not back up, and this file just wasn't on that list - again probably because no-one thought it mattered since it's a cache of an Apple database.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I haven't seen anybody point out the most relevant part of today's news: the location database that got everybody so alarmed is not something that your individual iPhone has collected and (some believe) reported to Apple. That database is something delivered from Apple to your iPhone to assist it in figuring out its location.
If police forensics labs are hoping to use that data to track people, then they've got useless mush. It will appear as if everybody has been everywhere.
Yes, this database is crowd-sourced. Which means that iPhones do report to Apple the correlation from WiFi networks and cell towers to GPS coordinates at a given time. If you wish to believe that Apple is associating that data with individual iPhones when they've flatly asserted they don't, nobody can prove otherwise. However, this is not what the recent controversy was about. That was about the location database, which is simply not about you or your phone.
Is Apple deleting the file, or are they erasing the file? There is a huge difference in the recovery of data from flash depending on which route they're taking.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What to you want to bet that government agencies will "accidentally" be given a copy of the decryption key.
It is interesting who has security problems next.
Pylons?
Heh. Thanks A/C, exactly the points I was going to make. Except with a little less sass.
Couple of links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation
etc.
So AFAIK the data is not sufficient to do more than place the phone in the general area (at least 100s of meters for the most part).
Most likely explanation for location-gate is that some developer got it working on their hardware, but they tended to re-install the os for testing. So it slipped through. Doesn't make them an idiot, just human.
There is nothing that indicates that triangulation cannot be done after the fact. That is just made up. -5
Sure - if you have all necessary data. Apple doesn't -100000000000000. Fuck off you idiot.
This is a perfectly reasonable response to one of the lamest troll attempts in this thread.
Fandroids hate facts.
Liar. Nutcase. Astroturfer. It doesn't matter - you are wrong.
Fandroids hate facts.