Your iDevice Is Tracking Your Location, Even Now!

Yeah nothing new in the Apple iOS scene, first it was apps getting your personal info and now this location tracking scandal.. It is being reported that since the release of iOS 4.x your idevice has been tracking your late night innocent encounters in a hidden file within the filesystem.

Security researchers found a file called “consolidated.db” and this little bugger caches your location data using latitude and longitude along with putting the cherry on top a time stamp… Apple is more than likely already on this issue and should be updating the iOS firmware to 4.3.3 or 4.4 so be prepared for yet another restore/update.

Of course when a scandal happens here come the powerful to make it ok and say its all a mistake and this is exactly what Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber is saying:

I don’t have a definitive answer, but my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history.

TheSpot says don’t worry, do you let people use/have your idevice for more than 10 mins??