Your iphone is watching you,% username%

British developers Pete Warden (Pete Warden) and Alastair Allan (Alasdair Allan) scratched one of the data files created by iPhones and iPads with iOS 4 and found that these devices record all the movements of its owner. The original article is posted on the O'Reilly radar , and its short translation is on the tape . Warden and Allan also wrote a small application that allows you to display on your map your adventures - or the one to whose iPhone or computer you can get.
Coordinates are determined by the base stations of the cellular network, not by GPS (apparently, not to keep the latter on all the time and save the battery), and are accumulated in the file consolidated.db, which is copied by tuna to the computer during synchronization. For the sake of justice, it should be noted that such a not very accurate track is in any case stored by the cellular network for some time and can be handed over to the police upon its request. But one thing is the police, and another is close (physically) to you people who can get access to information that you didn’t really want to disclose to them. Whether Apple itself is receiving this data is still unknown, as well as why it was needed at all to collect it.
Owners of iPhones are encouraged to at least enable encryption of backups in tuna.
Reactions from Steve Jobs's subordinates have not yet been reported.

DOP: It is very likely that in Russia it is possible to classify these actions as an administrative offense, namely the violation of the notorious Personal Data Protection Act, punishment for which is provided for by article 13.11 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation :

Violation of the procedure established by law for the collection, storage , use or dissemination of information about citizens (personal data) - entails ... the imposition of an administrative fine ... on legal entities - from five thousand to ten thousand rubles.

Correct me lawyers, we are talking about a fine of 5-10k rubles. for each fact of violation, that is, for each iphone. This is a good discount to the price of the iPhone (meaning Apple’s loss, since the fine is in favor of the officials.). How is it right to submit an application to the prosecutor?

DOP2: via anarleen : most phones store this information, and there is software that can receive it. From myself I will add that 1) the maximum chronology of events like SMS and photos is stored, but not a full track and 2) it is all stored somewhere in the phone, and not reset to any connected computer with tuna.

DOP3: via SuDDeN : a certain Alex Levinson states that he wrote about this vulnerability a hundred years ago in the book “iOS as a material evidence” (“iOS Forensic Analysis”, Sean Morissey et al., Apress 2010)

Levinson's summary : for those who are in the subject, this is not a secret, the file was previously called h-cells.plist, the data itself would not be transmitted to Apple itself, and those who do not encrypt the tuna backup are self-contained.