Here comes the first major threat to iPhones (well, not the first, the Droid by Motorola is already performing impressively against the iPhone, and in many areas surpassing its initial breakthrough). It appears the phones track your every movement and it doesn’t take much for someone else to get that information. Android devices are riddled with a similar tracking capability. Will it effect anyone? Who knows? When was the last time you didn’t know where anyone was? People now “check in” at McDonalds. Despite the obvious factor of “Who cares?”, these people better hope they locked all their doors and windows, since everyone on Facebook and Twitter now knows where you aren’t, namely, home…
Al Franken is pushing Steve Jobs from Apple for an answer…here’s a piece of his official letter to Jobs…
Dear Mr. Jobs,
running the iOS 4 operating system-sometimes logging their precise geo-location up to 100 times a day. The researchers who discovered this file found that it contained up to a year’s worth of data, starting from the day they installed the iOS 4 operating system. What is even more worrisome is that this file is stored in an unencrypted format on customers’ iPads, iPhones, and every computer a customer has used to back up his or her information. See Alasdair Allen & Pete Warden, Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is Recording Your Moves (Apr. 20, 2011), available at http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/04/apple-location-tracking.html.
