On the wrong track over iPhone privacy

This article was published in Spiked Online 27 April 2011

Campaigners should worry less about gadgets recording our locations and more about why society doesn't value privacy.

Anyone who has watched TV shows like 24, Without A Trace or Spooks will know that a mobile phone can give away an individual’s location. So, if you’re on the run from a mole-ridden counter-terrorist unit, if you’re trying to stop bent cops getting hold of you, or if you’re trying to elude MI6, remember: always dump your mobile phone.

Reports over the last few days have given the conspiracy-thriller scenario a rather more mundane twist. It seems that it’s not just corrupt officials or bent secret agents that might want to use our mobile phones to track our movements; the bods at every major mobile phone operating system manufacturer, from Apple to Google, have been doing it for ages. And we, the gullible public, were only dimly aware of it.

On Thursday last week, it emerged that on every iPhone and iPad, a secret file was recording each user’s locations at regular intervals. Taken over a period of months, this amounts to a record of our movements, made accessible to Apple. In the words of Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, the two British researchers who discovered the file, ‘after we dug further and visualised the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements’. Since the Apple story broke, it has become clear that Google and Microsoft do something similar with their mobile operating systems. That is, using cellphone towers and wifi access points to correlate our positions, they not only map our movements, they store them, too. If used together with other applications and internet services, it might be possible to build up a relatively complex picture of an individual’s activities. Whether Apple and friends intend to do so is unclear.