iPhone Lemmings Line Up for NSA Surveillance.....(another classic Wonkette.com)

[Jimmy]

It's a little more involved than that.  It's not in the sim, it's in the iTunes backup of the phone.  So you'd have to swipe the phone, connect it to iTunes, extract the file, and read it.  

This is old news.  It broke yesterday on the tech blogs.  

The Michigan story is crazy, and doesn't have any specific relation to Apple or iPhone.  The Michigan cops can pull the data from 3,000 cell models.  Unconstitutionally, I might add, which the ACLU is all over.

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

How does that work exactly?

"Ma'am did you know you were doing 60 in a 50 mph zone.  I need to see your license, registration and cell phone please."

[Lunican]

These phones really are going to be used for surveillance purposes.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

The pattern held true whether people stayed close to home or traveled widely, and wasn't affected by the phone user's age or gender.

"For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other," said Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who led the experiment. "We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576263261679848814.html

[Timkin]

I have thought for quite some time, there is no such thing left in this world, as privacy.  These stories are testimony to that.

[spuwho]

As the hackers found out when they successfully broke into Paris Hilton's phone years ago, 99% of the worlds phones and computers contain little if any information worth having.

A recent security specialist made a bluetooth based "antenna rifle" and sat up on the 35th floor of BOA Tower and was able to acquire data from hundreds of phones throughout downtown Los Angeles. His work only lasted a hour as someone spotted him and called authorities thinking he was a sniper or terrorist.

Most passwords can be found on a post it note inside the keyboard tray of any desk in a large office.

Jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick was successful because he acquired more data through social means then through any special technical skills.

Why would any government agency care whether I am driving to Target instead of Wal Mart?

If someone wanted to know my whereabouts, I think they could do it faster than checking the GPS breadcrumbs left behind by some smartphone.

By design, cell phones are designed to be locatable, so why the fuss?

[Lunican]

Target and Walmart care.

[Jimmy]

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html

Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location dataâ€"it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database? 
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties? 
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.

Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
ceases backing up this cache, and
deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

[BridgeTroll]

See...  Nothing to worry about at all...

[KenFSU]

Between the "bug" causing the iPhone to track user's locations over long periods of time and the unprecedented, insane breach of 70 million people's personal information through Sony's PSN network, we -- as a society -- should really be taking a step back and putting some real thought into where these things can potentially take us.