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Apple Releases iOS 4.3.3 To Fix Location Tracking
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has released a software update (iOS 4.3.3) to fix the much-talked-about iPhone Location Tracking bug. Apple faced a lot of criticism over the issue — iPhone and iPad secretly tracks users' locations and saves them in the device's cache as well as in a hidden file which is copied to the PC whenever the computer gets synced with device."
I'm pretty sure it was a feature, not a bug.
My understanding was that what was being logged was not the users' locations but rather that of the nearest cell tower or hotspot. But whatever, hurf durf, Steve wuz spying on us.
in other news, spotifys synching with your device may fail for unknown reasons.
The only "bug" is that they needed to hide it better, oops. I'm sure they've implemented a better hidden and implemented version with this release.
The update does not help if you are using an older unsupported iPhone or iPod.
FIX or hide somewhere else?
I must be the only person who thought that feature was nice. Given that it's not shared with anybody, it is nothing but useful for me.
When I go on vacation or someplace interesting, I drag along a GPS logger so I know where I've been, and I can geolocate my pictures. I have to take another device in my backpack and keep it charged etc. If my phone did that, I'd be happy as hell. There are apps for that, but they suck serious battery. This low resolution database would be a nice compliment to to the GPS logger.
Sheldon
Isn't this (the update) an implied admission that the original software tracking was wrong? I don't see how it could have been coded in, and have had the behavior described to it, as an accident. What will become of the data already collected?
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone. As of March 11, 2011, Apple stopped updating the iPhone 3G.
It look like after 2 years, you're no longer an Apple customer. You're a former customer until you prove otherwise with your wallet.
Disclaimer: I can't find any official statement from Apple about their current 3G support policy. But they did exclude th 3G from this update.
wow! 666MB to delete a file? not that bad at all!!
I like how there's more outrage over apple tracking users and then denying it than there is over all the suicides and anti-suicide pledges from the workers making these devices.
Two years is double or four times as long as other phone providers.
A Sony Ericsson phone is effectively abandonware as soon as you buy one. A HTC phone is released every 6-12 months and with such a large number of phones to support you won't see many or any updates after 12 months.
Apple's support for the iPhone is pretty exception in the mobile phone market. So unless you can provide an example of a mobile operator who provided support after two years I think you need to stop whining.
Given how limited the phone choice is, and how 'special' iPhone users are, and the premium they pay, and the fact that this 'bug' got (or will get) apple into trouble...
You can hardly compare can you?
And? I am neither a fan nor customer of apple, but I would say that if you last purchased something 2+ years ago... you're *not* a customer. You're a former customer.
Personally, I'm waiting for iOS 4.4.1 - it not only is a stable release, it also has anti-suicide factory-worker code in it.
(posted from my iPad2)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You're welcome...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
First, it's 2011. Most OEM's support android phones for months, not years. Second, people like you are looking for something to qq about. you would complain if your water was wet. Shut up.
From my experience, the 3G barely ran iOS 4. I don't blame them for stopping support of it or the "classic". Those users should stay on 3.2.2 and jailbreak it.
If you live in the states and bought a phone 2+ years ago, you are probably eligible for a very cheap upgrade from your carrier, provided you're willing to re-up your contract.
Given the high-profile nature of this, even if you're not due for a re-up because you bought a refurb 3G 6 months ago, I'd suggest picking up your phone and calling customer service for your cell provider, and asking them what they can do to help you out. If you're willing to renew your contract, I'd bet they'd be willing to cut you a deal on a new phone (maybe a free 3GS, or a cheap iPhone 4), or a discount on some other Android-ish device if that's your fancy.
Yes, it would be nice if they supported all of these devices forever. No, they don't do so today. So you can gripe on Slashdot, or you can call your cell provider and see if they're willing to cut you a deal on an upgrade. They usually are if you say "I'll go to $some_other_carrier over this, but I'd be willing to renew my contract today for 2 years if you can make something happen."
Am I the only person that's really annoyed by this piece of Apple marketing? Normal English would be: iPhones and iPads secretly track users' locations. Or, the iPhone and the iPad secretly track users' locations. Apple marketing refers to the damn things like they're people. John and Rick secretly track users' locations.
It's just a really strange way to talk about consumer electronics. They're product lines, not unique entities.
regardless, this demonstrates the benefits of free software. A similar phone loaded with aosp would have lifetime updates thanks to cyanogenmod.
As I understand it it has been ongoing from the first iPhone. This update doesn't work on those phones. Those phones are still tracking. There are still millions of people subject to tracking if this is correct. Where's their fix?
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Since it didn't actually track your location, only present a database of known network points around you, you actually couldn't use it to track anything. I had a look at my own data and you couldn't tell where I lived or worked from it, and those are places I go every day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OK, so you're justifying Apple tracking their users to within a few hundred yards.
Nope, wherever you were it was downloading stuff from a mile or two around you, possibly more. Looking at my own data I could not have told where I lived or worked from it, because it was too widespread and of course not related to where I was specifically. Not even centering the range of data collected really told you anything...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Depends on the warranty, no?
Automobile emission control systems (and, broadly interpreted, that includes the drivetrain) have an EPA-mandated 10 year / 100,000 mile warranty in the USA. That would mean the car you bought 9 years 11 months and 30 days ago still makes you a current customer.
Owning something that will be supported or last for only 2 years? I try to avoid that if possible.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
sorry to burst your bubble (well, actually, not really) but is that what you have seen for Android phones? You know, the ones that can't upgrade from 1.6 to 2..
First, it's 2011. Most OEM's support android phones for months, not years.
Second, people like you are looking for something to qq about. you would complain if your water was wet.
Shut up.
I see so you arguments are:
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
2) People should never complain
3) You like to abuse and bully people
I bet you'd defend Apple if they went around with squads killing people and committing atrocities. Brand loyalty is for suckers.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
OK, so Apple's warranty is for only one year. As far as I know, they haven't violated any of the terms of their 25 page contract I never read. As far as I can tell, their support is as good as any cell phone company. (Not a high bar to get over.) So you're justified in calling me a whiner.
Still, after paying more for that phone than I've paid for some computers, I'm pretty unhappy with Apple. I've been using Apple computers continuously (but not exclusively) since 1985. I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you bought it.
I really don't want to start another 2 year commitment on a smartphone. And the iPad I'm considering looks like less of a bargain if it is going to be made intentionally obsolete in 2 years.
Please show me an android phone that is still officially supported 2 years later.
No, i just think 2 years in today's market is fair. If they wanted to wow me they could do better. Apple's done it's share of shady stupid shit, but most companies have. (google, ms) I would throw them under a bus if android's UI was actually fully accelerated in 2.3. Maybe ice cream. Or maybe not. rows of icons is boring.
btw: if you feel abused a bullied, then you sir, have lead a sheltered life.
And People still can't stop making shit up! There is one file. (the Cache) its not hidden. It contains locations of cell towers and wi-fi APs. It does not contain the users location. The data for each tower was over written and only logged when towers came into range. As such the data never could be used to "trace some ones every move". The data would only show the general location of the user (being somewhere near a tower). The app that showed the locations sensationalized the whole thing by showing a week or mores worth of data by default putting in many more data points. Many days would actually contain few or no data points at all. And no one has shown this data being sent to Apple.
agreed but savvy consumers will vote with their wallet and with the benefit of hindsight choose wisely next time. :-)
You're understanding is wrong. It's only been happening since iOS 4. Of course, some phones are EOL at 4.2.
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous. iPhone 3G was supported from july 2008 to march 2011, that's nearly 3 years worth of OS updates for that model of phone. Its successor, the iPhone 3GS, was released june 2009 at which time the writing was on the wall for the older hardware but it was supported well after that.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone.
"'untrackerd' Cydia Tweak stops iOS Location Data Storing."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
"Don't expect the company to fix its mistakes, just spend more money!"
The iPhone 3G has this bug, but is not being fixed...
wasnt there an apple spokesman saying that apple NEEDED to know locations of its customers to provide them 'better service' ? just 1-2 days ago in a story we read here ?
Read radical news here
iPhone 3G stopped being sold in June 2010
The myTouch 3G (i.e. the second Android phone in the U.S.) is currently running Android 2.2. That puts it on par with the iPhone 3GS. The G1 is the first "high end" (there really was no such term when it came out since there were no low end devices) Android phone by HTC to outright stop receiving updates. The Droid, similarly, is running Froyo, and receives important updates. Sure, the low end phones stop getting updates after 6-12 months, but if you consider that the same market is usually met by the previous year's iPhone, it's comparable. Just a point of clarification: while it's true that Gingerbread is the latest version of the OS, most of the improvements were hardware support (and a slight color scheme change). If a phone already functioned on Froyo, the user wouldn't really notice much difference if it was updated. For that matter, bug fixes for 2.2 continued to be released after 2.3 was out. In that respect, Gingerbread could be seen as more of a fork than a true update, and will be merged back in when Honeycomb and GoogleTV are merged in Ice Cream Sandwich. I ran both Froyo (CM 6.1) and Gingerbread (CM 7) on my myTouch 4G and could hardly tell the difference.
That's sweet - thanks. And since Apple is ignoring the 3G, the risk of jailbreaking it is much lower. Apple's not going to patch the 3G flaws that allow jailbreaking.
That reminds me when I was a kid and didn't want to take baths. I would point out to my mom that I shouldn't have to bathe because, after all, other kids would be even filthier than me and that was OK!
My mom though, would have none of it. She forced me to take a shower daily, under the argument that it didn't matter if other kids were filthier, that I should be clean nevertheless.
The truth is that companies will try to get away with as much crap as possible, and it's up to us consumers to demand the best possible treatment rather than settle for the lowest common denominator and call it a day, just because "everbody else is the same or worse".
As an iPhone 3G owner which I've just barely finished paying for (bought in late February 2009), I'm dismayed that Apple has simply decided that a perfectly working piece of hardware just won't get any security fixes. I don't know if they should be asked to provide security fixes forever, or for ten years, or for five. I know two years is too little and I couldn't care less what Sony Ericsson or anyone else does. I didn't buy a phone from them, I bought one from Apple, I still regularly buy stuff from them through their store, and I resent basically being told I no longer matter to them. If they don't think I'm no longer a customer of theirs then maybe I shouldn't be one, a thought that I'll definitely keep in mind next time I buy a phone (two or three years down the road, when my trusty 3G stops working or actually becomes obsolete).
The two year thing is why I ditched Android and went to Apple.
Sure, they both have their pros and cons, but at least Apple's updates and supports are going to last near full contract term. Not having my phone declared too obsolete and stating I should move with the times after six months.
My iPhone is "tracking my location" a bit like firefox is "tracking my web usage" by using a cache.
Yes it uploaded the location of nearby towers and public wifi to an Apple database, but I WANT IT TO DO THAT. I don't want to wait 10 minutes for an initial GPS fix like I have to with my car GPS unit.
What I don't want is any kind of location logging (time and place for my particular device, whether a GPS fix or a nearby phone tower/wifi ) to take place without my knowledge either stored on my phone or uploaded, which is traceable to my particular device.
Any such behaviour would be legally actionable under most countries laws i would hope.
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous.
You're kidding me, right? This is the same manufacturer that's famous for selling a phone that drops out if you hold it wrong, and screens that scratch if you look at them harshly.
I've had few things from Apple and their support is my #2 reason for disliking them. My #1 reason is lockdown and crippling in order to sell the next model. #3 is their draconian control of the sales channels.
Every product I've owned or used at work from Apple has given me nothing but trouble. Just junk, and their customer service stinks. Apple is NOT geek friendly, is NOT stylish and does NOT provide good support.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
My car is going on 6 years old. The rOads i drive it on are atill the same. So yeah, im happy to keep it. The roads My iphOne drives on will likely be obsoleted in 2.
The problem with relying purely on GPS is that it can't be in use all the time, especially when the phone is on standby, since it takes quite a bit of power to run the GPS hardware. When the phone wakes up it can take up to 2 minutes for it to get a full GPS lock on it's location.... but by identifying nearby cell towers/wifi base stations, it can return its approximate coordinates instantly.... It just needs to query a database that can return those rough coordinates of such cell tower ID/Wifi base stations MAC, then use the GPS to fine tune it in the background.
Of course, the issue is that a database that maps cell tower/base station to a GPS coordiate has to be stored somewhere. Your phone either has to access it live (which if it goes to a server can be monitored live and give away your location), or it can access an internal database (like the iphone does, except it got backed up as part of the system image). Either way there's no way around it, since cell towers and wifi base stations don't naturally broadcast their own GPS coordinates.
Now I don't know about you, but I'd be awfully annoyed wait 2 minutes every time my phone has to figure out where the heck it is; especially if I'm trying to pull up a map at the side of the road, or at a place that GPS won't work at all, such as an underground parking garage.
go ahead and track me Jobs... news flash, I'm at your Mom's 24/7 anyways. go ahead, remotely activate my crappy iPhone camera and see for yourself
>I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still
>pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you
>bought it.
My iPhone 3G was rather creaky with iOS 4. But my 2007 iMac is still my primary computer, still useful, and still getting updates. And based on the developer previews, I do expect it to run Lion fairly well. The only reason I can think of that won't "last" five years is if I switch to a MacBook Pro. And even then, I'd pass it along to a friend who could get some use out of it... almost certainly past the five year mark.
Imagine all the people...
And yet somehow they manage to snag the highest ratings for support, every time. Maybe you are the issue in the relationship.
2nd Generation iPod Touches stopped getting iOS updates when they were 1.2 years old. iPod Touch 3rd Generation was released 9/9/09, and iOS 4.2.1 (the last one for iPod Touch 2nd Generation) was released November 22, 2010.
From your posts in this thread, your clear grinding axe and your belligerent "Apple can do no right" dogma, I suspect that the reason "every Apple product" gives you trouble is down to the common factor in all of those interactions: you.
Given today's flurry of posts in this thread your neckbeard must be seriously chafed.
you got a problem with your oOos?
I bet you'd defend Apple if they went around with squads killing people and committing atrocities.
Because that's SO exactly what he said!
keeps a list of recently viewed websites. Mozilla Foundation is spying on you!
This is about the same as Apple has done here. Caching a list of recently seen (or possibly seen based on your location) antennae with their location (not: your location but theirs) to give your GPS a faster fix next time.
However, while a limit of 2MB browsercache is ridiculously low it turned out that 2MB for location-data is a lot and at least if people turn off GPS this cache could be purged. And saving data on the location of seen GSM Towers while GPS is turned off (some provide them themselves ota) may lead to misunderstandings.
Nothing to see here but a unintendedly big size limit and a dissonance between engineers thinking "Location is not provided to Apps" and user experience "no location data even if acquired passively is used in any way".
The other topic - saving your position _for_a_day_ and sending the visible antennae to Apple anonymized - is something completely different.
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I bought a 3G in late May of 2009, just before the 3GS came out. Terrible timing, I know. I also purchased a two year Applecare plan for the phone that has not expired. My contract is also not expired. Why am I not a current customer of Apple?
I don't want to upgrade now to an iPhone 4; I learned my lesson about buying just before the next model comes out. I'll hold out for the 5.
and get an iPhone... ;^)
Let's not forget that there are TWO carriers out there that sell iPhones: AT&T and Verizon. I happen to be a customer of the latter.
Guess what. While AT&T is going to be getting iOS 4.3.3, my iPhone4 is still plodding along on iOS 4.2.7, and iTunes reports I have the latest software update! When do Verizon users get to catch up with the rest of the world?
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
So, what's the big deal with this? The only problem is the fact that it was left unencrypted. If anyone is upset that a company knows where they are due to their device which they carry, they should keep in mind that the cell phone carriers already know this information and keep it in a database. These databases are made readily available to law enforcement without any requirements for a subpoena or court order. They just log onto a portal, select what they want and pay a nominal fee to the telco. I would think that this is of greater concern than Apple's screwup in not encrypting the file.
Like it or not, when you're buying new equipment, you're looking at less than two years' support in most cases. I don't necessarily think this is a good thing (I remember when appliance warranties were 5, 10, 15 year), but the only way to avoid it today is to buy various extended support packages at inflated prices.
Of course it's not quite the same, as software is not warrantied item to begin with. It's been a while since I read an EULA, but the last I checked , there are disclaimers left and right -- namely, no warranty; and -- as importantly -- no obligation set forth wherein the vendor is required to provide any ongoing updates at all.
And as you mentioned, automobiles are under special rules.
That's sweet - thanks. And since Apple is ignoring the 3G, the risk of jailbreaking it is much lower.
You mean since Apple is ignoring it, all the vulnerabilities you find in a jailbroken iPhone are suddenly gone?