Ja tem gente fazendo campanha contra a Apple e os iPhones por causa do sistema de tracking embutido no sistema desse celular.
Já imaginam um Big Brother, lá na California, vigiando os passos de cada um dos zilhões de usuários dos iPhones para tramar sabe-se lá qual complô consumista contra seus interesses individuais.
Acho que não sou paranóico a este ponto. Sei que muitos seguem os meus passos, amigos e inimigos, sobretudo neste blog, onde atuo sobretudo por divertimento, mas não acredito que eu venha a fazer loucuras por indução capitalista de quem segue meus passos pelo meu iPhone (aliás, muito útil).
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Mobile tracking
The Difference Engine: The spy in your pocket
The Economist, April 29th 2011, 9:00 by N.V.
LOS ANGELES - FOR those who managed to miss the “Locationgate” brouhaha last week, a brief recap. The story broke in the Wall Street Journal, which reported on how two British researchers had discovered a database file called “consolidated.db” that contained unencrypted details of the owners’ travels over the past year. The file, found in computers that had synched with Apple’s iPhones and iPads, contained a date-stamped log of the longitude and latitude coordinates of the various locations visited. Right or wrong, the conclusion was that Apple was tracking every move its customers made. An uproar erupted as a result, with demands by lawmakers that the company explain its actions forthwith.
On April 27th, Apple broke its week-long silence with a denial that its mobile devices were tracking customers, but then promised to fix the privacy issue that did not exist anyway. Coming out of medical leave to help squelch the imbroglio, Steve Jobs, Apple’s charismatic chief executive, admitted that the company had made a mistake in how it handled the location data on its iPhones and iPads. But in no way did the devices log users’ locations multiple times a day. The data found in the phones referred to the location of various cell towers, not the users, which could be as far as 100 miles away, said Apple. Even so, independent researchers were quick to point out that the data could still allow phones to be tracked to within 100 feet.
According to Apple, it was all a misunderstanding on the part of the two British researchers. The file they had stumbled upon, the company claimed, contained simply the locations of known WiFi hotspots and cell towers that had been downloaded from Apple. The location database on the company’s servers has been built up over the past year using “anonymous, crowd-sourced information” as millions of iPhone and iPad users unknowingly synched (via iTunes) the location details of cell towers and WiFi hotspots they had come in contact with. The local data were updated and cached on the mobile devices simply to help them figure out their own location.
Mobile devices need to know where they are to make calls and receive them—as well as to do clever tricks like display maps of the immediate surroundings, pinpointing stores, restaurants and entertainment of potential interest. The phone finds where it is by listening for the whispers from cell towers and WiFi hotspots in the neighbourhood, as well as from GPS satellites in orbit.
Like a web browser that caches data on a personal computer about websites visited so the pages can be pulled up promptly the next time the user returns to them, having the coordinates of local towers or hotspots already in the cache makes it easier for the phone to triangulate its own location. That way, the device responds quicker than it would if it had to download the data for triangulation each time from Apple, or wait a minute or so for the faint signal from a passing GPS satellite. By reducing the amount of computation done on board the device, caching speeds things up and saves battery life in the process.
Once explained, most users accept that as reasonable. What upsets them, though, is the way Apple has been secretly caching up to a year’s worth of comings and goings on owners' devices—and reporting the information back to its location database at head office whenever users synch with iTunes. More damning still is the way the company keeps collecting such data when users deliberately turn the location services off.
That is not what Apple informed members of Congress last July when first quizzed on the matter. Representative Joe Barton of Texas told the Wall Street Journal this week that Apple “lied” to him and another lawmaker when it said its phones do not collect and transmit location-based data such as mapping when location services are switched off.
Mr Jobs blames “bugs” in the software for the misunderstanding. Apple has now promised to upgrade the software in coming weeks to reduce the amount of location data cached in the devices from a year’s worth to no more than a week’s supply. The new software will also delete the location data stored in the phone’s cache when the user turns its location services off. In addition, the next version of iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, will ensure that all location data cached and reported back to Apple are fully encrypted.
So much for Apple's damage control. But why collect such voluminous amounts of location data anyway? Clearly, Apple is racing to catch up with Google and others who have already carved out large chunks of the fast-growing market for location-based services. According to Gartner, a research firm based in Stamford, Connecticut, sales of location-based services are currently running at $2.9 billion a year. But the market is expected to grow to $8.3 billion by 2014. In particular, Apple wants to offer iPhone users information on traffic-congestion, as Google already does using data fed back from the millions of Android phones travelling the roads of the world. A great deal of revenue from location-based advertising is at stake here.
All of which begs the question: How is Google acquiring all this information on its customers’ whereabouts? The short answer is that its Android phones and tablets are doing much the same as Apple’s iPhones and iPads—only more so. They survey the user’s location every few seconds and report the information back to the company several times an hour. According to Samy Kamkar, a security analyst interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, an Android phone can also transmit a unique identifier tied to the individual device—and thus the customer’s home address. As far as we are aware, Apple does not do that.
Readers may recall that Google got into hot water last year when its fleet of StreetView cars, which map and photograph streets around the world, inadvertently collected e-mail addresses, passwords and other personal details while scanning for WiFi hotspots. Several European governments were up in arms, and ordered the company to cease such wholesale invasion of their citizens’ privacy. Google says it has now stopped collecting personal information this way.
No question that Apple and Google—as well as the wireless carriers themselves—still have much to explain. Lawmakers will have a chance to question both Google and Apple when they testify before Congress on May 10th. What is clear, though, is that rather than abate, the wholesale tracking and collection of information about people’s behaviour while on the move is set to increase dramatically. As mobile phones and tablets take over from desk-bound computers, marketers are no longer content to classify consumers merely by their postal codes or telephone area codes. They want to know where precisely they are at every moment while out and about—so they can send text messages with instant inducements (coupons, discounts, special offers, you name it) to enter one particular store or restaurant they are passing rather than another.
We should be both cheered and cautious about such developments. Above all, let us hope that lawmakers at least insist that sufficient transparency be provided so people can choose how much or little of their personal details to make available. For that and more, Locationgate has been a useful wake-up call.
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