Apple’s legal council: We ‘must have’ comprehensive user data
April 25, 2011
Guidelines for user spying are written under United States Telecommunications Act of 1996.
International Business Times
April 25, 2011
Security researchers unveiled this week that Apple’s iPhonewas actively logging the whereabouts of users, storing location data into an easily assessable file on the device.
But it’s not just iPhones that are keeping track of their users.
Apple’s iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4, and iPad models are also keeping track of consumers whereabouts. Mac computers running Snow Leopard and even Windows computers running Safari 5 are being watched.
The question is why?
The company has remained silent after researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden revealed this Wednesday that the iPhone was storing logs of users’ geographic coordinates in a hidden file.
“We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations,” the security experts wrote in their blogs.
While Apple has since remained tight-lipped on the matter, not responding to any media-inquires, another privacy snafu last year gives insight into what the company is doing with the information.
In June 2010, Congressmen Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas wrote a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs inquiring about Apple’s privacy policy and location-based services.
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