According to a research by two Britisher researchers, they have found out, on Wednesday that Apple the last version of Apple's iOS for the iPhone and the iPad is secretly designed to be storing location of the devices all the time. Moreover, they accused that this information is stored in a secreted file. The accused iOS 4 operating system was released in June, 2010.
Image via CrunchBaseAccording to their website radar.oreilly.com, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, made the accusation through a blog post saying that "Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps." Furthermore, they acclaimed that "We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional." At the end the researchers adding that it raises a number of "security and privacy implications."Explaining the risk of this matter at hand, the researchers also gave few examples of how risky such data collection can be. They said that "By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements." Furthermore, they raised the concern that “What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's on any machine you've synched with your iOS device.” Moreover, it was even more dangerous as "It can also be easily accessed on the device itself if it falls into the wrong hands.
All these allegations made by Allan and Warden were made publicly at the Where 2.0 conference, which took place in San Francisco. The Guardian newspaper reported that they also reached the height of risk allegations, when the declared that even "Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released."
According to Allan and Warden, they had made several attempts to get in touch with Apple's product security team regarding their conclusions but there was no reply to their queries. Hence, mostly the crowd was convinced that Apple devices do keep a record of the latitude and longitude coordinates with the relevant time stamp, suspiciously perhaps through a cell-tower triangulation method.
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