Xoom was half-baked, but that's not the problem. The real problem is that when you buy a tablet, you are just buying a tablet. With a phone, you are buying a phone that is also a computer. So Android phone buyers have primary considerations which have nothing whatsoever to do with Android vs iOS or anything else. Subsidized phone price, plan rates, carrier choice all are more important for more people than what OS it runs.
Simply put, when you buy a phone, you are buying a phone first, and a smartphone platform second. When you buy a tablet, you are buying a tablet. In that case, the quality of the OS, and platform in general, is much more important.
Take ereaders as an example. No one buys the one that runs Android specifically. They buy the one that had the best price, book selection, book price, and physical characteristics. Android phones are bought in the same general way.
I'm generalizing quite a bit here. There are plenty of geeks who buy Android phones specifically because of Android, but there are many more people who buy iPhones specifically because of the iOS platform.
There is absolutely no way to derive the nine (your location) from the data set stored in the phone other than "somewhere in this general part of town", at most.
You might want to tell that Apple selling 'location based services'. If the location isn't determinable, those services aren't going to be very valuable...
The location isn't determinable from the file on the phone. It does not log your location, nor does it contain enough information alone to derive your location except extremely generally (something like, "in or near North Hollywood"). But when your phone sees a cell tower and a WiFi access point or two, it can query the database file on the phone, without telling Apple or anyone else, and determine a more close approximation. It can then use that to fill in the gaps while GPS lock is occurring, helping the phone to identify its more exact location (within a few meters) before the GPS system could ever fully do so without some outside assistance.
And perhaps it isn't city block resolution 'yet'. If the cop pulls you over on one side of town, and there was a robbery on the other side of town in a cars similar to yours and your phone shows you withing a 'few' blocks of that robbery at that time?
That file, by definition, will never be "city block resolution". Also, Apple is addressing this by encrypting the file, culling it more quickly, and if you're really paranoid, you can just turn off location services, and the phone will delete the file.
As it stands right now, no one can access the file without hacking your phone or accessing an unencrypted backup. The police can't just read it from your phone without either a search warrant or your consent. And if they wanted to, they can just request the information from your cell provider, which is going to be much more precise than that location database cache, by law. If you're really worried, you can just turn off your phone altogether, which even today will do the trick, but as long as you are connected to the cellular system, you are being tracked, and being tracked in more detail, over much longer durations, and tied to your actual phone, which is tied to who owns it, by your cell company, all of which are much worse than anything Apple does, even right now before they put in to place practices which diminish even further the level of "tracking" done.
Every twelve hours, and it's not trackable to any given phone or person. Even if the government knocked on Apple's door, and asked them for the location of a person, or even just a single phone, they could not tell them.
On the other hand, they can just go to AT&T or Verizon and demand the location, and AT&T or Verizon will be able to pinpoint you to within 100 yards. And AT&T and Verizon log this data, and don't anonymize it.
But yeah, Apple's data, which can't track you, *that's* the thing that gets your little nerd panties in a wad.
Jobs, Forstall, and Schiller did an interview with All Things Digital, and were only evasive twice. Once when asked about future products, and once when asking about Steve Jobs' health/return to Apple. Both of which are normal and understandable.
They also put out a Press Release about what currently happens, and what they will be doing to change the process. It also explains why what's happening is not what people think is happening.
This doesn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence, as I know they behaved badly, and they are still not being completely honest.
How, exactly, have they "behaved badly"? And how are they not being honest? Other than simply being Apple and/or doing anything with location data, which seem to be your only real problems, and something which they can never/will never address. Thus no matter what they say or do, you will simply concoct another bullshit (and increasingly nebulous, like going from "they are tracking you" to "they are being evasive") reason to complain.
Um... That's exactly what aGPS is. You use information from outside of the GPS system to make guesses while the actual GPS lock occurs.
i meant what about aGPS requires a cache of *my* previous locations. that's what people upset about.
But it's not a list of your previous locations. You're right that that's one of the things that people are upset about, but the thing they are upset about doesn't exist. It never happened. Ever. The other thing, which also never happened, is they think Apple is keeping information on their servers of where their users are. Apple knows where iPhones were, but the data is entirely anonymous. They don't even know if the data points are from the same phone!
the next worst thing to knowing i am at point X is knowing that i'm between points A, B, and C, or even just that i came within 1000 feet of point D. it doesn't have to be a record of your exact location down to the meter to be an invasion of privacy.
You are trying to equate to very different things. And it's not an "invasion of privacy" if the log is entirely within your possession. You might as well complain that Mail.app is an invasion of privacy, because it stores a log of all your emails, nevermind that it's part of its function!
It's a cache on your phone. It's not a cache of where *you* were. It's a cache of Apple's location database. Your phone isn't storing which cell towers and WiFi APs you saw. It sends that data to Apple (which anonymizes it), and sends you a data set of thousands of nearby locations. *That's* what's in the file.
basically, apple's using people to fill out there aGPS database. at least google paid people to do this.
Which is something else entirely again. You're all over the map.
Apple is addressing every single one of your concerns. The real ones, at least. Your imaginary concerns are already addressed, in a sense, by not even existing.
In the next update, if you don't want the cache, turn off Location Services and iOS will delete it, and it won't send completely anonymous data to Apple. And if you don't think Google is also using your data, you don't understand what Google is. Collecting and collating data is their business. At least with Apple, the end user is the customer. With Google, the end user is the product.
what part / subset of aGPS requires a cache of previous locations?
Um... That's exactly what aGPS is. You use information from outside of the GPS system to make guesses while the actual GPS lock occurs. This speeds up location fixing greatly. The cache is part of that outside information. aGPS doesn't specifically require a cache of previous locations (and that's not what this cache is), but it requires *something*, and a cache of nearby WiFi APs and cell towers is a very useful something for aGPS.
Like I said, that cache is not the phone's previous locations, it's only locations of cell towers and WiFi access points. It's a cached subset of a significantly larger database. Absolutely nowhere in that cache does it say where your phone was other than that your phone asked for information in the general (and quite large) area. So you can presume the phone was in Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, or something, but you can't say it was in a specific address or neighborhood.
How about the shenanigans where they say that they are not tracking the location of the phone, but that they are using location data to build a traffic database. To be of any use traffic databases need to be near real time, and they have to be accurate to within about a block. It is useless to know where a phone is "more than one hundred miles away" last week.
They never know which phone is where, just that *a* phone is *roughly* somewhere.
The only thing Apple knows is that there was an iPhone in a rough area (the data isn't precise enough for GPS-level triangulation). Each time the data is sent to Apple, it's anonymized in such a way that it doesn't even know two data uploads are from the same phone.
And the information stored on the phone is much, much less precise. It's a collection of thousands of locations around where you currently are, 99% of which your phone can't even see.
Since you brought up the term "cognitive dissonance", you should realize that obstinately reinforcing your own ignorance, despite being presented with facts to the contrary, is a textbook example of this.
It is absolutely impossible for Apple to tell you were any individual person or iPhone is, and it's impossible to pinpoint an exact location (even within miles, in most cases) of where you were based on the data in the location cache. A cache which, by the way, is only accessible by hacking an iPhone, or perusing an unencrypted backup. Both of which are being addressed in the next iOS update.
Apple is not tracking, or "bugging", anyone. Get over it. Reality's nice this time of year.
Your attempt to deceive other readers will only be convincing for those that don't click (or keep up with the news). Why you would expect to fool me - who knows.
Based on your post, it would appear you are very easily fooled, were I so inclined (and I'm not).
Of course Apple both stores and transmits the location data (as if splitting that hair looks good for you or them??) - and the anonymizing mechanism is either designed by sub-literate morons or flawed on purpose; Apple's gps data can easily be tied back to the user in most cases - as I pointed out in the original post.
No, it's completely impossible to locate a phone, let alone a user, using Apple's data. They apply a random ID to the data they receive from your phone each time it sends them data. They have no way whatsoever to tell who the data or even which phone the data came from. No way whatsoever.
And the data stored on the phone is just a subset of Apple's vast location database. It contains thousands of entries for WiFi and cell towers that your phone isn't within tens of miles of. There's no way to tell from that data even within a few city blocks where you have ever been.
You're not a very interesting conversational partner until you own up. So don't expect any more responses until then.:)
I don't expect a response, but only because to do so would require either for you to continue promoting a clearly false claim, or to admit that everything you've said up to this point is completely false.
It's not storing nine, and it's not storing three threes. It's not storing the WiFi and cell towers your phone sees, it's storing thousands of them in your area. There is absolutely no way to derive the nine (your location) from the data set stored in the phone other than "somewhere in this general part of town", at most.
It is completely impossible to locate a person using the data in the iPhone even down to a city block.
What "shenanigans", exactly? That the phone stores a small cache of Apple's location database, instead of either loading the entire database into the phone (which would be impossible) or always querying Apple's servers each time you request your location (which would actually be sending *more* location information to Apple than they are already doing)? Or just not having aGPS at all, and requiring the user to wait a few minutes each time they want to use an app to check where they are? Or perhaps draining the battery every hour by maintaining a full GPS lock at all times?
The only shenanigans I see here are the people whose tin foil hats have been wrapped too tightly. Or perhaps that's just a bug that's easily remedied, leaving one with a ball of foil, a freshly unencumbered head, and a sense of proportion more closely related to reality.
That's assuming it's a 'bug' that it didn't stop recording your location...
It never recorded your location. It's a cache (about 2MB) of a subset of Apple's location database. Your phone tells Apple, "I see these cell towers, and these WiFi access points" and Apple sends a small database of other nearby towers and APs, with their coordinates, so that as you drive around, your phone can estimate its location when you use Location Services, thus greatly speeding up GPS lock.
The iPhone never, ever, logged your specific location. Ever.
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
I stopped there. Accepting apologies in this thread anytime.
Um, try again. That's data that's sent to Apple, not stored on the device. It's completely anonymous, including not even being tied to the phone itself.
Additionally, the article is not clear what it means by "GPS data". Apple sends data as to which cell towers and WiFi access points you are near, but I don't think it actually acquires actual GPS coordinates. No other source is claiming this, and people misuse "GPS" a lot, especially in this case. But even assuming that it is actual GPS location data (only for the sake of argument), nothing I wrote is wrong.
I don't require an apology, but it would be refreshing to see someone live up to the standards they apply to others.
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
Let's assume the iOS data includes speed (it doesn't, but potentially could). The way it works is that Apple would never know that the phone that was traveling 90MPH at 10am was the same phone that was connected to the cell tower 3 miles from your home and saw the six WiFi access points in your neighborhood at 6am.
I don't know how TomTom's anonymous data works, but if it includes route data, or is tied to a single device ID ("anonymous" or not), they really do need to change it. But if it just reports that "27 cars per minute travel at 15 or ore MPH above the speed limit on this stretch of road at this time of day" or something like that, it's really no big deal, and something that a lot of locations already collect. In fact, it can be seen as a public service. As long as it's truly anonymous, like Apple's data.
It's a cache of a subset of a database from Apple. It's not a list of locations the user was at. Also, it's not necessarily intentional, because all the things you mentioned are the defaults for iOS. Intentional is, in fact, the changes they are putting into the next iOS update, which address every single concern on this issue.
Plus, cell tower locations is your location for anyone that knows how to do math. I presume that Apple has a couple of people on staff that are capable of doing some fairly simple math.
No, it's not. It's a rough estimate of your location, and this information is being collected and logged by your cell carrier, by law, and is not anonymous, like it is with Apple.
Apple doesn't care where you were, they only care where certain towers and access points were (and soon, how many iPhones were in a specific stretch of road, for aggregate traffic info) so they can send a location database cache to your phone so that it can acquire its location more quickly. That is all it's doing. Apple never, ever, knows where you were unless you use a specific Apple service (like the Apple Store app, which asks for your location to find nearby Apple Stores, and most certainly doesn't log that information personally in some Orwellian database, like you seem to think they are doing).
The lack of culling the file is a red herring. It is the small 'mistake' they use to divert people from the fact that they were secretly bugging their phones. Apple was continuing to collect location data and transmit that data back to Apple even when the user turned off location services. As bad as poor cache culling is, it is a distraction that is being exploited by Apple.
They aren't bugging the phone. The information you are referring to is anonymous, and is inherent with using a device that connects to cell towers. By definition, this information is in another party's hands. With Apple, this info is anonymous. With your carrier, it's not.
You don't know that Apple isn't tracking their users on a personal basis. Apple is notorious for hand waving and telling you that "We've always been at war with Eastasia". A perfect example is to say they are not recording the location of your phone, but instead are recording the cell towers and wifi points. We all know that it is pretty trivial to calculate a point from that, and in fact is how all GPS supplies a users location. If Apple defines "no personally identifiable information" the way they define "don't log your location", then they are tracking users.
Your example makes no sense whatsoever. When they say "no personally identifiable information", they don't mean location. That's not personal. They know an iPhone was in some location (with some varying level of accuracy), but they don't know which iPhone.
Claiming that they were not secretly tracking users because they admitted it AFTER they got caught does not mean they were not doing it secretly.
Except they aren't tracking anyone. They never admitted to it, because it never happened.
The EULA excuse is just that. An excuse. It is intentionally writing in a vague manner in a document that they know full well will not be read by the vast majority of people. Just as their admitting that they are still tracking users, and will continue to track users is writing in New-Speak so that users will not know they are being tracked. Just read this forum, and your own post to see how many people know they are being tracked even after the New-Speak press release.
Using Orwellian terms doesn't make it any more true. The EULA is fairly clear. I read the location part, did you? It very clearly states that the information is anonymous.
Here is a question. (Presuming you have an iPhone) Do you know that you are being tracked by Apple? If the answer is no, then you have validated my point on how Apple can admit that they are tracking users and still be doing it secretly.
No, in fact I know that I'm not being tracked by Apple. I know that they collect cell tower and WiFi AP information, and I know that they don't tie it to me personally, or my device specifically.
Do you know that Google does the same thing? Do you know that they are less clear with regards to how private the information is? Do you know that the end user is Apple's customer, but not Google's? Do you know that your cell carrier keeps a log of which towers you connect to, and that it's not anonymous, but very personally identifiable?
The location file stored was not a log of where the phone was. It's a subset of the large database Apple has on where WiFi access points and cell towers are located
In terms of the privacy implications, it may as well have been a log - they were recording the estimated locations of the cell towers and WiFi access points in view together with the timestamp at which they were seen, which is obviously enough information to extract a coarse history of the phone's movements. When it comes to privacy issues, it doesn't matter what the information was intended to be used for, but also what it could be used for in practice.
To an extent, but it's not what people were making it out to be. For example, merely knowing which city (or rough part of a city) a person was in is quite different from knowing which address they were physically at, and I'm sure most people will react quite different to those very different scenarios.
Also, this file was never sent to Apple, and is entirely within the user's possession. However, the procedural updates very well address the lingering privacy concerns pretty much 100%. The file will be encrypted, will be culled within seven days, won't be included in back ups, and will be deleted when Location Services is turned off. It's difficult to imagine how it could be done any better than that.
Just like Facebook pro-actively protects your privacy by selling your personal information to everyone willing to pay for it. But you need a password to log in so you're protected.
Um, no. Apple doesn't allow anyone to access your personal location data without permission. They have also pissed off some publishers by making it opt-in, and entirely optional, for users to allow them access to information that the publishers usually require and themselves sell.
In other words (and in my original words), Apple proactively protects their users' privacy.
Remember, unlike Facebook and Google, the end user is the actual customer. Your accusations are not only unfounded, but completely contradict reality. Tin foil hats tend to do that.
Pretty much, yup. As far as whether to purge the data or not, Apple's position is that seven days is good enough. The data changes over time (cell towers and WiFi access points are are added, replaced, updated, and removed), so you'll need to update it anyway, and I don't suspect it's a very large data transfer.
Additionally, this is exactly how Apple's Maps app works. It caches data temporarily, but doesn't store it long term, instead redownloading as needed. I think this is a good compromise between performance, privacy, bandwidth, and storage.
Yup, there it is, at the very end. Sorry about that.
However, the original point stands. Apple is not simply encrypting the file, as you suggested. Your tinfoil hat is still a bit tight. Apple isn't tracking you, they aren't simply hiding behind encryption. They proactively protect their users' privacy.
Yup, there it is, at the very end. Sorry about that.
However, the original point stands. Apple is not simply encrypting the file, as Dunbal suggested (in this thread), and you suggested in a different one. Your tinfoil hat is still a bit tight. Apple isn't tracking you, they aren't simply hiding behind encryption. They proactively protect their users' privacy.
Apple: We never did anything wrong, but pardon us while we fix it anyway.
If you were to read the actual Press Release, you'd realize how silly your post is.
The location file stored was not a log of where the phone was. It's a subset of the large database Apple has on where WiFi access points and cell towers are located. This helps the phone locate itself more quickly when the user requests it. Without this cache, the phone would have to rely solely on GPS (which can take minutes) or have to request data from Apple each time. The access points and cell towers in the file are not places where the phone has been, but places around where the phone has been so that if the phone moves to another location, it already has a local database to look up its location with.
This is not wrong. Not only is it not wrong, but it's good design. Additionally, Apple never tracks a user or a phone. This is also not wrong.
What they are fixing are some details of the implementation, but not the overall design of the implementation. Apple will continue to send a subset of the location database to your iPhone, but it will be stored for no more than seven days. It will not be included in the backup to your Mac or PC, and when you turn off Location Services, the cache will be cleared (and, by definition, it will not ask Apple for any location data, nor will it log it anywhere else).
Since you felt compelled to demonstrate your ignorance twice, I'll correct you twice:
Directly from Apple's Press Release. Nowhere does it state Apple will encrypt the data on the device. It does state that Apple has always encrypted the connection to Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Xoom was half-baked, but that's not the problem. The real problem is that when you buy a tablet, you are just buying a tablet. With a phone, you are buying a phone that is also a computer. So Android phone buyers have primary considerations which have nothing whatsoever to do with Android vs iOS or anything else. Subsidized phone price, plan rates, carrier choice all are more important for more people than what OS it runs.
Simply put, when you buy a phone, you are buying a phone first, and a smartphone platform second. When you buy a tablet, you are buying a tablet. In that case, the quality of the OS, and platform in general, is much more important.
Take ereaders as an example. No one buys the one that runs Android specifically. They buy the one that had the best price, book selection, book price, and physical characteristics. Android phones are bought in the same general way.
I'm generalizing quite a bit here. There are plenty of geeks who buy Android phones specifically because of Android, but there are many more people who buy iPhones specifically because of the iOS platform.
There is absolutely no way to derive the nine (your location) from the data set stored in the phone other than "somewhere in this general part of town", at most.
You might want to tell that Apple selling 'location based services'. If the location isn't determinable, those services aren't going to be very valuable...
The location isn't determinable from the file on the phone. It does not log your location, nor does it contain enough information alone to derive your location except extremely generally (something like, "in or near North Hollywood"). But when your phone sees a cell tower and a WiFi access point or two, it can query the database file on the phone, without telling Apple or anyone else, and determine a more close approximation. It can then use that to fill in the gaps while GPS lock is occurring, helping the phone to identify its more exact location (within a few meters) before the GPS system could ever fully do so without some outside assistance.
And perhaps it isn't city block resolution 'yet'. If the cop pulls you over on one side of town, and there was a robbery on the other side of town in a cars similar to yours and your phone shows you withing a 'few' blocks of that robbery at that time?
That file, by definition, will never be "city block resolution". Also, Apple is addressing this by encrypting the file, culling it more quickly, and if you're really paranoid, you can just turn off location services, and the phone will delete the file.
As it stands right now, no one can access the file without hacking your phone or accessing an unencrypted backup. The police can't just read it from your phone without either a search warrant or your consent. And if they wanted to, they can just request the information from your cell provider, which is going to be much more precise than that location database cache, by law. If you're really worried, you can just turn off your phone altogether, which even today will do the trick, but as long as you are connected to the cellular system, you are being tracked, and being tracked in more detail, over much longer durations, and tied to your actual phone, which is tied to who owns it, by your cell company, all of which are much worse than anything Apple does, even right now before they put in to place practices which diminish even further the level of "tracking" done.
Every twelve hours, and it's not trackable to any given phone or person. Even if the government knocked on Apple's door, and asked them for the location of a person, or even just a single phone, they could not tell them.
On the other hand, they can just go to AT&T or Verizon and demand the location, and AT&T or Verizon will be able to pinpoint you to within 100 yards. And AT&T and Verizon log this data, and don't anonymize it.
But yeah, Apple's data, which can't track you, *that's* the thing that gets your little nerd panties in a wad.
They are highly evasive in their answers
For example?
Jobs, Forstall, and Schiller did an interview with All Things Digital, and were only evasive twice. Once when asked about future products, and once when asking about Steve Jobs' health/return to Apple. Both of which are normal and understandable.
They also put out a Press Release about what currently happens, and what they will be doing to change the process. It also explains why what's happening is not what people think is happening.
This doesn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence, as I know they behaved badly, and they are still not being completely honest.
How, exactly, have they "behaved badly"? And how are they not being honest? Other than simply being Apple and/or doing anything with location data, which seem to be your only real problems, and something which they can never/will never address. Thus no matter what they say or do, you will simply concoct another bullshit (and increasingly nebulous, like going from "they are tracking you" to "they are being evasive") reason to complain.
Um... That's exactly what aGPS is. You use information from outside of the GPS system to make guesses while the actual GPS lock occurs.
i meant what about aGPS requires a cache of *my* previous locations. that's what people upset about.
But it's not a list of your previous locations. You're right that that's one of the things that people are upset about, but the thing they are upset about doesn't exist. It never happened. Ever. The other thing, which also never happened, is they think Apple is keeping information on their servers of where their users are. Apple knows where iPhones were, but the data is entirely anonymous. They don't even know if the data points are from the same phone!
the next worst thing to knowing i am at point X is knowing that i'm between points A, B, and C, or even just that i came within 1000 feet of point D. it doesn't have to be a record of your exact location down to the meter to be an invasion of privacy.
You are trying to equate to very different things. And it's not an "invasion of privacy" if the log is entirely within your possession. You might as well complain that Mail.app is an invasion of privacy, because it stores a log of all your emails, nevermind that it's part of its function!
It's a cache on your phone. It's not a cache of where *you* were. It's a cache of Apple's location database. Your phone isn't storing which cell towers and WiFi APs you saw. It sends that data to Apple (which anonymizes it), and sends you a data set of thousands of nearby locations. *That's* what's in the file.
basically, apple's using people to fill out there aGPS database. at least google paid people to do this.
Which is something else entirely again. You're all over the map.
Apple is addressing every single one of your concerns. The real ones, at least. Your imaginary concerns are already addressed, in a sense, by not even existing.
In the next update, if you don't want the cache, turn off Location Services and iOS will delete it, and it won't send completely anonymous data to Apple. And if you don't think Google is also using your data, you don't understand what Google is. Collecting and collating data is their business. At least with Apple, the end user is the customer. With Google, the end user is the product.
Or just not having aGPS at all ...
what part / subset of aGPS requires a cache of previous locations?
Um... That's exactly what aGPS is. You use information from outside of the GPS system to make guesses while the actual GPS lock occurs. This speeds up location fixing greatly. The cache is part of that outside information. aGPS doesn't specifically require a cache of previous locations (and that's not what this cache is), but it requires *something*, and a cache of nearby WiFi APs and cell towers is a very useful something for aGPS.
Like I said, that cache is not the phone's previous locations, it's only locations of cell towers and WiFi access points. It's a cached subset of a significantly larger database. Absolutely nowhere in that cache does it say where your phone was other than that your phone asked for information in the general (and quite large) area. So you can presume the phone was in Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, or something, but you can't say it was in a specific address or neighborhood.
How about the shenanigans where they say that they are not tracking the location of the phone, but that they are using location data to build a traffic database. To be of any use traffic databases need to be near real time, and they have to be accurate to within about a block. It is useless to know where a phone is "more than one hundred miles away" last week.
They never know which phone is where, just that *a* phone is *roughly* somewhere.
The only thing Apple knows is that there was an iPhone in a rough area (the data isn't precise enough for GPS-level triangulation). Each time the data is sent to Apple, it's anonymized in such a way that it doesn't even know two data uploads are from the same phone.
And the information stored on the phone is much, much less precise. It's a collection of thousands of locations around where you currently are, 99% of which your phone can't even see.
Since you brought up the term "cognitive dissonance", you should realize that obstinately reinforcing your own ignorance, despite being presented with facts to the contrary, is a textbook example of this.
It is absolutely impossible for Apple to tell you were any individual person or iPhone is, and it's impossible to pinpoint an exact location (even within miles, in most cases) of where you were based on the data in the location cache. A cache which, by the way, is only accessible by hacking an iPhone, or perusing an unencrypted backup. Both of which are being addressed in the next iOS update.
Apple is not tracking, or "bugging", anyone. Get over it. Reality's nice this time of year.
Your attempt to deceive other readers will only be convincing for those that don't click (or keep up with the news). Why you would expect to fool me - who knows.
Based on your post, it would appear you are very easily fooled, were I so inclined (and I'm not).
Of course Apple both stores and transmits the location data (as if splitting that hair looks good for you or them??) - and the anonymizing mechanism is either designed by sub-literate morons or flawed on purpose; Apple's gps data can easily be tied back to the user in most cases - as I pointed out in the original post.
No, it's completely impossible to locate a phone, let alone a user, using Apple's data. They apply a random ID to the data they receive from your phone each time it sends them data. They have no way whatsoever to tell who the data or even which phone the data came from. No way whatsoever.
And the data stored on the phone is just a subset of Apple's vast location database. It contains thousands of entries for WiFi and cell towers that your phone isn't within tens of miles of. There's no way to tell from that data even within a few city blocks where you have ever been.
You're not a very interesting conversational partner until you own up. So don't expect any more responses until then. :)
I don't expect a response, but only because to do so would require either for you to continue promoting a clearly false claim, or to admit that everything you've said up to this point is completely false.
It's not storing nine, and it's not storing three threes. It's not storing the WiFi and cell towers your phone sees, it's storing thousands of them in your area. There is absolutely no way to derive the nine (your location) from the data set stored in the phone other than "somewhere in this general part of town", at most.
It is completely impossible to locate a person using the data in the iPhone even down to a city block.
What "shenanigans", exactly? That the phone stores a small cache of Apple's location database, instead of either loading the entire database into the phone (which would be impossible) or always querying Apple's servers each time you request your location (which would actually be sending *more* location information to Apple than they are already doing)? Or just not having aGPS at all, and requiring the user to wait a few minutes each time they want to use an app to check where they are? Or perhaps draining the battery every hour by maintaining a full GPS lock at all times?
The only shenanigans I see here are the people whose tin foil hats have been wrapped too tightly. Or perhaps that's just a bug that's easily remedied, leaving one with a ball of foil, a freshly unencumbered head, and a sense of proportion more closely related to reality.
That's assuming it's a 'bug' that it didn't stop recording your location...
It never recorded your location. It's a cache (about 2MB) of a subset of Apple's location database. Your phone tells Apple, "I see these cell towers, and these WiFi access points" and Apple sends a small database of other nearby towers and APs, with their coordinates, so that as you drive around, your phone can estimate its location when you use Location Services, thus greatly speeding up GPS lock.
The iPhone never, ever, logged your specific location. Ever.
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
Wrong.
I stopped there. Accepting apologies in this thread anytime.
Um, try again. That's data that's sent to Apple, not stored on the device. It's completely anonymous, including not even being tied to the phone itself.
Additionally, the article is not clear what it means by "GPS data". Apple sends data as to which cell towers and WiFi access points you are near, but I don't think it actually acquires actual GPS coordinates. No other source is claiming this, and people misuse "GPS" a lot, especially in this case. But even assuming that it is actual GPS location data (only for the sake of argument), nothing I wrote is wrong.
I don't require an apology, but it would be refreshing to see someone live up to the standards they apply to others.
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
Let's assume the iOS data includes speed (it doesn't, but potentially could). The way it works is that Apple would never know that the phone that was traveling 90MPH at 10am was the same phone that was connected to the cell tower 3 miles from your home and saw the six WiFi access points in your neighborhood at 6am.
I don't know how TomTom's anonymous data works, but if it includes route data, or is tied to a single device ID ("anonymous" or not), they really do need to change it. But if it just reports that "27 cars per minute travel at 15 or ore MPH above the speed limit on this stretch of road at this time of day" or something like that, it's really no big deal, and something that a lot of locations already collect. In fact, it can be seen as a public service. As long as it's truly anonymous, like Apple's data.
It's a cache of a subset of a database from Apple. It's not a list of locations the user was at. Also, it's not necessarily intentional, because all the things you mentioned are the defaults for iOS. Intentional is, in fact, the changes they are putting into the next iOS update, which address every single concern on this issue.
Um, yeah, that's how bugs work. They generally don't get fixed until they are discovered.
Plus, cell tower locations is your location for anyone that knows how to do math. I presume that Apple has a couple of people on staff that are capable of doing some fairly simple math.
No, it's not. It's a rough estimate of your location, and this information is being collected and logged by your cell carrier, by law, and is not anonymous, like it is with Apple.
Apple doesn't care where you were, they only care where certain towers and access points were (and soon, how many iPhones were in a specific stretch of road, for aggregate traffic info) so they can send a location database cache to your phone so that it can acquire its location more quickly. That is all it's doing. Apple never, ever, knows where you were unless you use a specific Apple service (like the Apple Store app, which asks for your location to find nearby Apple Stores, and most certainly doesn't log that information personally in some Orwellian database, like you seem to think they are doing).
Cognitive dissonance indeed!
The lack of culling the file is a red herring. It is the small 'mistake' they use to divert people from the fact that they were secretly bugging their phones. Apple was continuing to collect location data and transmit that data back to Apple even when the user turned off location services. As bad as poor cache culling is, it is a distraction that is being exploited by Apple.
They aren't bugging the phone. The information you are referring to is anonymous, and is inherent with using a device that connects to cell towers. By definition, this information is in another party's hands. With Apple, this info is anonymous. With your carrier, it's not.
You don't know that Apple isn't tracking their users on a personal basis. Apple is notorious for hand waving and telling you that "We've always been at war with Eastasia". A perfect example is to say they are not recording the location of your phone, but instead are recording the cell towers and wifi points. We all know that it is pretty trivial to calculate a point from that, and in fact is how all GPS supplies a users location. If Apple defines "no personally identifiable information" the way they define "don't log your location", then they are tracking users.
Your example makes no sense whatsoever. When they say "no personally identifiable information", they don't mean location. That's not personal. They know an iPhone was in some location (with some varying level of accuracy), but they don't know which iPhone.
Claiming that they were not secretly tracking users because they admitted it AFTER they got caught does not mean they were not doing it secretly.
Except they aren't tracking anyone. They never admitted to it, because it never happened.
The EULA excuse is just that. An excuse. It is intentionally writing in a vague manner in a document that they know full well will not be read by the vast majority of people. Just as their admitting that they are still tracking users, and will continue to track users is writing in New-Speak so that users will not know they are being tracked. Just read this forum, and your own post to see how many people know they are being tracked even after the New-Speak press release.
Using Orwellian terms doesn't make it any more true. The EULA is fairly clear. I read the location part, did you? It very clearly states that the information is anonymous.
Here is a question. (Presuming you have an iPhone) Do you know that you are being tracked by Apple? If the answer is no, then you have validated my point on how Apple can admit that they are tracking users and still be doing it secretly.
No, in fact I know that I'm not being tracked by Apple. I know that they collect cell tower and WiFi AP information, and I know that they don't tie it to me personally, or my device specifically.
Do you know that Google does the same thing? Do you know that they are less clear with regards to how private the information is? Do you know that the end user is Apple's customer, but not Google's? Do you know that your cell carrier keeps a log of which towers you connect to, and that it's not anonymous, but very personally identifiable?
The location file stored was not a log of where the phone was. It's a subset of the large database Apple has on where WiFi access points and cell towers are located
In terms of the privacy implications, it may as well have been a log - they were recording the estimated locations of the cell towers and WiFi access points in view together with the timestamp at which they were seen, which is obviously enough information to extract a coarse history of the phone's movements. When it comes to privacy issues, it doesn't matter what the information was intended to be used for, but also what it could be used for in practice.
To an extent, but it's not what people were making it out to be. For example, merely knowing which city (or rough part of a city) a person was in is quite different from knowing which address they were physically at, and I'm sure most people will react quite different to those very different scenarios.
Also, this file was never sent to Apple, and is entirely within the user's possession. However, the procedural updates very well address the lingering privacy concerns pretty much 100%. The file will be encrypted, will be culled within seven days, won't be included in back ups, and will be deleted when Location Services is turned off. It's difficult to imagine how it could be done any better than that.
They proactively protect their users' privacy.
Just like Facebook pro-actively protects your privacy by selling your personal information to everyone willing to pay for it. But you need a password to log in so you're protected.
Um, no. Apple doesn't allow anyone to access your personal location data without permission. They have also pissed off some publishers by making it opt-in, and entirely optional, for users to allow them access to information that the publishers usually require and themselves sell.
In other words (and in my original words), Apple proactively protects their users' privacy.
Remember, unlike Facebook and Google, the end user is the actual customer. Your accusations are not only unfounded, but completely contradict reality. Tin foil hats tend to do that.
Pretty much, yup. As far as whether to purge the data or not, Apple's position is that seven days is good enough. The data changes over time (cell towers and WiFi access points are are added, replaced, updated, and removed), so you'll need to update it anyway, and I don't suspect it's a very large data transfer.
Additionally, this is exactly how Apple's Maps app works. It caches data temporarily, but doesn't store it long term, instead redownloading as needed. I think this is a good compromise between performance, privacy, bandwidth, and storage.
Yup, there it is, at the very end. Sorry about that.
However, the original point stands. Apple is not simply encrypting the file, as you suggested. Your tinfoil hat is still a bit tight. Apple isn't tracking you, they aren't simply hiding behind encryption. They proactively protect their users' privacy.
Yup, there it is, at the very end. Sorry about that.
However, the original point stands. Apple is not simply encrypting the file, as Dunbal suggested (in this thread), and you suggested in a different one. Your tinfoil hat is still a bit tight. Apple isn't tracking you, they aren't simply hiding behind encryption. They proactively protect their users' privacy.
Apple: We never did anything wrong, but pardon us while we fix it anyway.
If you were to read the actual Press Release, you'd realize how silly your post is.
The location file stored was not a log of where the phone was. It's a subset of the large database Apple has on where WiFi access points and cell towers are located. This helps the phone locate itself more quickly when the user requests it. Without this cache, the phone would have to rely solely on GPS (which can take minutes) or have to request data from Apple each time. The access points and cell towers in the file are not places where the phone has been, but places around where the phone has been so that if the phone moves to another location, it already has a local database to look up its location with.
This is not wrong. Not only is it not wrong, but it's good design. Additionally, Apple never tracks a user or a phone. This is also not wrong.
What they are fixing are some details of the implementation, but not the overall design of the implementation. Apple will continue to send a subset of the location database to your iPhone, but it will be stored for no more than seven days. It will not be included in the backup to your Mac or PC, and when you turn off Location Services, the cache will be cleared (and, by definition, it will not ask Apple for any location data, nor will it log it anywhere else).
Since you felt compelled to demonstrate your ignorance twice, I'll correct you twice:
Directly from Apple's Press Release. Nowhere does it state Apple will encrypt the data on the device. It does state that Apple has always encrypted the connection to Apple.
You lose. Twice.