Researchers have recently come upon that Apple's iPhone is tracking and recording your location coordinate along with the time you were in that certain place. The iPhone can track down the exact longitude and latitude of the locations that you have been. These locations on some devices have been store for more than a year for some users.
Once the iPhone is plugged into the owners computer or any computer, the locations get synced to the
computer. This might not seem like a big deal at first but once you start to think about what this means, it could potentially lead to identity theft, or credit card information theft. This raises a lot of privacy concerns for many iPhone users.
Although, when you get to thinking even more about your locations possibly getting released to the public, is it really a big deal? Yes the credit card and identity theft are major concerns but at the moment, many phone users, not just iPhone users, are posting their current locations to places such as Gowalla and FourSquare. We have also ran into instances similar to this with Google and their "Latitude" system in 2009. The "Latitude" program allowed cell phone owners to enable their cell phones to give out the details of their locations to "trusted" contacts. While this raised a privacy concern, Google claimed that users had to specifically choose who their location data was available to.
Another reason this should not be a big concern for users is because cell phone providers are already tracking phone locations. But from what we know at the moment, these records are only available to law enforcement. So what is Apple using with this location information? Could it be used to spy on your family, friends, or just a random person? Yes, it could but I honestly do not think that this is why Apple is tracing the locations. They are most likely just using the information for advertising to the public and not necessarily selling the information or giving it away to agencies. Apple is most likely not just trying to trace where the users are.
So what do you think about this incident? Is this something that will grow and become a big incident or do you think it will just pass over within a month? Also, do you think this is such a big security flaw even though we never knew about the ability for the iPhone to do this until this week?
Ann Smarty