A roundup of today's "Locationgate" news

I can't get this to work... it can't find the "consolidated.db" file. I want to see what it says about me.

It's a Verizon iPhone 4, if that matters, but backups are working again. For the past three years, I've had them disabled, since it would take over an hour to sync my iPod touch.

I just checked my location data.
I was in Greece in September, and there is no record of that.
I was never in Texas, but there are a lot of data locations there.
It has me in Los Angeles, a LOT, and I have only passed through there.
This is really disconcerting, because if something when haywire, and I was accused of something, I have NO faith in the iphone's backing up my alibi(s). Scary to have inaccurate data being collected about oneself.

This paragraph from the iPhone Tracker site may (partially) clear up why the data isn't exactly accurate:

"To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately."

Your use of the term "locationgate" strikes me as cheesy. Very cheesy.

Everyone needs to learn the difference between the words "tracking" and "caching."

They also need to learn the distinction between the phrases "cell towers" and "my every movement".

Because the general public is unable to deal with the complexity of technology, much less language, and the fuel that the media adds to the fire by using terms like "locationgate," Apple will have no choice but to...

... "always encrypt the cache file of known cell towers it must save after you turn off the phone's power, in order to keep battery use to a minimum and save the phone from having to constantly contact nearby towers it should already know about.

But you can't say that.

The only thing people will remember is "locationgate" and "tracking my every movement."

Sad, the world we live in, unable to deal with itself. We'll just have to live with it though, eh?

This doesn't seem like a huge deal to me... if someone has my phone long enough to plug it into a computer and see where I've been, chances are, they've already beaten me up and stolen my phone.

This is actually interesting to see where I've been throughout the US. It even showed my trip to Florida this January. It really doesn't make a difference whether Apple knows my location or not. I just don't care.

I'll be looking for another Hoopla video from Jonathan Mann.

Michigan traffic cops, border officials, and other government reps are already grabbing this specific Apple-created data as part of what they consider a legitimate search. However imprecise the data, it can and will be used against you in a court of law. If a little red dot shows up anywhere near a crime scene, they'll try to use it against you. (Check out flexyourrights.org).

It's not up to Apple to decide what it can or cannot do. They may curate their App Store, but they can't curate what laws apply to them in countries where they operate.

The phone tracker thing produced wildly inaccurate data for me. It thinks I was in many places I've never been, including Las Vegas (unless the phone went without me). It also pegs San Francisco as the place I've been to the most. I was there for three days last year but if you looked at my data it would say that I lived near Market Street (I spent most of my time around Golden Gate park). It also pegs a lot of travel in cities I never spend any time in, or that I passed through once. It's absolutely worthless for tracking me down.

Anyone grounded in reality will recognize this as the non-issue that it is and go back to more important things.

Why is every iPhone issue named with "-gate"? I don't find this funny and meaningful.

I question the accuracy of the iPhoneTracker application at rendering this data. The application showed that my phone was very active in states that it had never travelled to. My home city was lit up the most at least, but there were regions in my state that had a large amount of activity that my phone never travelled to. There are also distant states that the phone had been, and in use, which did not register at all.