iPhones and Location: Let’s Not Get Hysterical

There’s been a lot of discussion of the discovery that there’s a database file called consolidated.db on your iPhone, full of latitude and longitude coordinates. Most of it has been completely hysterical, and not based on an actual look at the data involved.

I downloaded Peter Warden’s iPhoneTracker program, as well as the source code for it, and played around with it a good bit yesterday. I’m not done—I haven’t done a raw dump of the locations in the file yet—but I’ve been able to determine several things, the most important of which is that the iPhone is not tracking your every move, by any stretch of the imagination — via redwolf.newsvine.com