Now I love me a good piece of Apple information just like the next guy, they’re just too hard to resist as they’re some damn fine blog fodder. Still for the most part I steer clear of product speculation and rumours simply because I’m not really interested in writing on fluff and my posts would be lost in the deluge of other blogs parroting the same “facts”. Still every so often I come across a bit of Apple news that deserves reporting on, like how people were getting the whole Antennagate thing wrong, and yesterday brought across another piece of news that had all the tech bloggers in a tizzy.
Yet again I feel they’ve all got it wrong.
What I’m talking about is the the iOS location fiasco that’s currently winding itself up in the media today. In essence its been shown that iOS devices have a log of all your location data from the day you first turned on your phone. The file in question resides on your phone but is copied across to your PC when you sync with iTunes. If you’ve selected to encrypt your backups the file will be encrypted but it is stored in plain text on your phone. People are crying foul over how Big Brother Apple is tracking them and how this is a major breach in privacy and you’d be forgiven for thinking that if you didn’t bother going beneath the surface of these stories.
Now I was considering writing about this yesterday (instead choosing to post some inane dribble, sorry) but I had really no desire to comment on something that seemed like a non-issue. Whilst I’m not keen for someone to follow my every move I was pretty sure that the location database that people were mucking around with was more than likely a cache of previous location data, most likely used in future GPS calculations to improve accuracy. Additionally there was absolutely no evidence that this database had ever made its way to Apple or anyone else for that matter and the only program that has the demonstrated ability to read those files can only do so if its unencrypted and not on your iPhone.
The privacy issue is a different beast however but in reality no one would try to use something like that location cache to track you. Whilst sites like Please Rob Me might provide insight into how such data could be used for nefarious purposes the thing is that most crime will still be committed the old fashion way, by going up to your house and seeing if anyone is there. Hiding all your location information from online sources won’t help combat this problem and the only way this database file could be used against you was if someone had direct access to your phone or PC, the former which indicates your phone has been stolen (got a pin code on that buddy?) and the latter that they’re already in your house (got a password on your PC?).
Of course in doing my research for this post today I came across a few other posts detailing my exact predictions of what the problem might be. People familiar with the matter investigated the Android platform to see if something similar was being done on their end and sure enough there was. The difference between the Apple and Android was that Android had a hard limit set on the number of records whereas the iPhone had no such limit. More than likely Apple will set an upper limit on the number of location records that are kept in the log files in the next iOS update so that people don’t get all butthurt about it again, even though there was nothing wrong in the first place.
Apple products seem to have the uncanny ability of drumming up a PR storm no matter what minor thing happens with them. Whilst this particular ability is primarily positive for Apple it seems even the Apple opposition falls prey to going hyperbolic on any little flaw in the iOS platform, creating fiascos out of what are merely features of the platform. This is why I steer clear of many Apple related articles, there’s simply too much group think on either side of the fence for there to be any proper discussion. So hopefully my little blog here has helped clarify that big brother isn’t watching you and we can all go back to our normal lives and not have to worry about Big Brother Apple watching us in our sleep.
You can still wear the tinfoil hat though, it’s sexy.
Well, for my part, if Apple has some reaction to this—and I’m not sure I see so far why they should—I hope they make truncating or limiting the file an option. It seems more and more likely that this database is intended to allow Location Services to “get a sense” of where you are by triangulation and comparison against known cell-tower and WiFi locations without having to go “off-device” to get the location data. Which, basically, seems like a pretty reasonable thing to me.
If you make the safe assumption that people tend to spend most of their time in more or less the same collection of places, then, for instance, keeping my data for Amsterdam or Newcastle might make decent sense, space allowing: I’ll want Location Services to work quickly the next time I go back, as well.
I’m not sure I see this so much as a “butthurt” thing as I do a “people freaking out and staying away from the beach because they say ‘Jaws'” thing. Folks seem to love to get themselves all worked up about terrible stuff so much that they make terrible stuff up sometimes.
Agreed, as a heavy user of location based services I quite like that it doesn’t take 30 seconds each time an app wants to triangulate me and is able to get a reasonable approximation using a cache like this. From a developer side its great too as I don’t have to stall my app for ages whilst the GPS does its thing, making the UX a lot better.
The use of butthurt might be a bit off base, although it seems people really take it personally when Apple/Facebook/Google/whoever does something related to their privacy. Agreed on your point though, the story about people being in an outrage over something is more of a story than the thing itself.