Thursday, April 21, 2011

Where have you been lately

#Privacy is elusive. When you use a mobile phone and some cars it is obvious where your car or phone has been. Both can make their position known to a service provider. By triangulation the positions can be and often are recorded.

There is a lot to do about the registration of positions on Apple mobiles. Because of this registration all kinds of applications are enabled that rely on localisation.

This data is now openly available as it is located on the “User Data Partition”. This data used to be available hidden in the Apple Property List format..

The relevancy is that governmental organisations increasingly claim the right to investigate computers and mobile phones without a warrant. As this data is now easily and obviously observable in sqlite3 there is not much stopping Big Brother from being a big nuisance.
Thanks,
       GerardM

1 comment:

Teun Spaans said...

Don't worry about everything. To find where you are and where you have been on what time of the day the government has your cash withdrawals at atms, your travels by car (gsm box in your car for rush hour tax, though not in all countries), your cell phone data (even when you are not calling), your travel by public transport (not in all countries), your credit card usage, your debit card payments, and probably some things i overlook. To find what you have been doing, they can track your last two years of internet usage (mail, surfing), who you have been calling, and again your debit card payments.
What is most amazing is that despite this massive data load governments are incapable of quickly finding missing persons. :p