A new finding by tech journalists, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, may make you look at your trusty iPhone and iPad a bit differently.
Allan and Warden found a file hidden in Apple's iOS 4 mobile operating system that stores a list of your locations along with time stamps. The file, "consolidated.db", contains latitude-longitude coordinates that while not precise, wind up being pretty accurate. This is all information that your cellular company already has, but if another company wanted to gain access to it, it would need a court order.
There's no telling why Apple is storing this info, or what it plans to do with it. There's no evidence that the data is being pulled off of your iPhone or iPad at any time. So for now, there's no real reason to panic.
Allan and Warden reached out to Apple's Product Security team but did not get a response.
On a slightly brighter note, they built an application that allows you to look at your own data that you can download here: petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker.
Head over to the O'Reilly Radar to read their full report and to watch a video of Allan and Warden discussing their findings.
[O'Reilly Radar via Giz Mag]
