Posts Tagged ‘location based services’
Your iPhone Keeps a Secret Log of Everywhere You Go, Security Experts Find
No other phone stores this information in this way
This could theoretically be useful for anyone interested in knowing where an iPhone owner spends his or her time — advertisers, employers, spouses, parents.
“Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements,” according to researcher Pete Warden.
To be clear, such a snoop would need access to your phone or computer and a way to extract and refine the data. It is not sent to Apple nor any third parties, as far as the researchers can tell — it’s just stored on an individual user’s devices. But it is apparently not very difficult to extract the location data from a user's computer.
Warden and Alasdair Allan say they tried to find similar location tracking code on Android phones, but could not find anything. “We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this,” Warden tells the Guardian.
Given Google’s penchant for location tracking and , the alarm is perhaps surprising — Google’s lets users see their friends on a map, for instance. But Latitude requires that users actively choose to track their location information; in this case, the user is unaware of the data collection. The Guardian reports that Apple did not comment on why the file was created or whether it could be disabled. If you upgrade to a new phone, the file is transferred to that next-generation device, which the researchers say means the data collection is not accidental.
Warden — who has previously worked for Apple — and Allan created their own app that finds the hidden file among the stored backup files on a Mac and turns it into a map. If you don’t care to visualize your travels, Warden explains on his website.
The researchers believe the location data is obtained by triangulating the phone’s position against the closest cell phone towers, which uses less battery power than GPS. It also explains why some of the data is incorrect, as triangulation is much less precise than GPS. But the data is still alarmingly accurate, tracking your history as an iPhone owner through the months and years. Forgot that you took that trip to Boston last summer? Your iPhone didn't.
It’s not clear how this information would be used, but there are several possible explanations, including targeted mobile advertising, synchronization for location-based networks like FourSquare, understanding commuter habits, and so on.
Allan found the file while the pair were working on how to visualize mobile data, having already collaborated on other data-visualization projects including a radiation map for Japan. At first the researchers weren’t sure what it was, Warden explains on his website.
“After we dug further and visualized the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements,” he writes.
There is no real way to disable this logging at the moment, though you can encrypt your data to make it harder to read once it's synced to your computer. This is a big enough problem that we expect Apple will respond at some point, so we'll keep you updated if and when that happens.
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Foursquare launches new Android app earlier than expected
Foursquare may have just , but the company isn’t done with the upgrades just yet. Cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley just that the Android version of the new app is now available, complete with the new comments and photos features.
Though the company noted the Android version wouldn’t be out till sometime “later next week,” Android users are getting an early Christmas present. The reason may be a crowdsourced approach to testing the app, according to another from Crowley.
The comments feature is meant to give users some added value around meeting up with friends and exploring around town and the photos feature will allow for users to attach photos to a friend’s comment or the venue itself. On Monday afternoon, .
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.
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Google Latitude iPhone app will help you stalk your friends
After last week, Google’s official Latitude iPhone app is , the this morning.
Google as a way to easily keep track of your friends’ locations in real-time. Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian users have been able to take advantage of the service for some time with background updating, which automatically updates their Latitude location. Now with an official app, combined with , iPhone users, too, will be able to take advantage of all Latitude has to offer.
Apple blocked Google’s first attempt at releasing a Latitude app last year (Google said Apple was worried users would confuse it with the Maps app), so that let users manually update their locations. Being a web app, it couldn’t offer the convenient background updating feature found on other platforms.
Latitude is the second rejected Google service to get an official iPhone app in the past month. Apple , after . Google after Apple’s rejection, but just like Latitude, it was no replacement for a native app. Apple’s change of heart can be traced back to .
I’ve only had a short while to dig into the Latitude app, but it seems pretty straightforward. You can view a map of all of your friends’ locations, change privacy settings and invite more friends to Latitude. The background location updating seems to work just fine, and it can also be turned off easily. Now that Latitude is fully functional on the iPhone, I’ll definitely be inviting more friends (who don’t mind being stalked) to use the service.
Google says that there are over 9 million Latitude users on other mobile platforms. I expect that number to explode now that iPhone users can take full advantage of it.
The Latitude app requires iPhone OS 4 and is compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and the 3rd/4th generation iPod Touch. You can view a video demonstration of the app below:
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Forrester reveals who uses location-based services the most
While only have ever used a location-based service, like popular check in app , data from shows that young adult males with college degrees appear to be the main user group.
In addition to being the main user group, the group may also be heavy online influencers as 38% of them claim that their networks ask them for their opinion before making a purchase decision. It would be interesting to know what types of products their networks ask them about before a purchase. Most likely, it’s probably electronics.
Finally, the data shows that the group may also be heavy mobile researchers, meaning that they are more likely to search for information on products or services as well as look up ratings and reviews. If the user group is constantly checking in to locations, then they are probably also using their smartphones for the following.
The nifty graph below spotlights more specifics location-based service users to US online adult users.
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With new programming tools, Foursquare hopes more developers will check in
Location-based check-in service just announced that is has officially released the second version of its application programming interface, or API, in beta. The first version of its API, used by third-party developers to build software that connects to Foursquare’s services, will still be functional, but will probably phase out in a few months, according to the company.
Rumors of the new API surfaced several weeks ago when Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai , a question and answer site, about where they could get place data for a check-in application. At the time the new API was in an early testing phase, but it appears the company was looking for applications to test it.
The company lists several updates:
- OAuth2 is much easier to use, more secure for users, and can even be used entirely from client-side Javascript.
- By dropping XML support, we’ve been able to make the server more responsive (but not ; sorry).
- There’s extensive documentation that includes sample applications and an API explorer.
- A lot of work was put into consistency and clarity.
- And last but not least, we’ve added oft-requested new endpoints for fetching user’s badges, user’s venue histories, and venue popularity.
The new API comes on the heels of cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley mentioning that the company now has 5 million users, , and is seeing more than 2 million check-ins a day. The company also recently decided to to help with growth.
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has close to 40 employees.
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Andreessen Horowitz writes big check for Factual’s data platform
, a startup that claims to host hundreds of thousands of data sets, has raised $25 million in its first round of institutional funding.
When I spoke to founder and chief executive Gil Elbaz more than a year ago, he had a big vision for the Los Angeles company — . The company uses data mining tools to gather and structure public data from across the Web, and it also gets data from users and partners. (Developers get a discount on Factual’s data if they’re contributing data too.)
Today, Elbaz still sounded ambitious, but he acknowledged that Factual still has progress to make. Specifically, the company recently started to promote its location data to developers of mobile and Web-based location apps. Factual has already signed deals with large partners like Facebook (for its Places service in the United Kingdom and Japan) and location app-maker Booyah.
Factual raised the money from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, which already . Making these deals helped convince investors that there’s a big opportunity here, Elbaz said — leading to the $25 million round (which is large for a Web startup’s first institutional round) and presumably to a large valuation as well.
Moving forward, Elbaz said he still wants to “go broad” and tackle lots of different data areas. At the same time, Factual needs to compete with startups that focus on specific types of data — on the location front that includes Localeze and SimpleGeo — so in the short-term, Elbaz said, ‘We’ll be picking off certain verticals where marketing dollars will prove effective.”
When I asked which areas he had in mind, he pointed to the Factual website, which highlights data in education, health, entertainment, and government.
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Foursquare: 5 million users, 25,000 new ones a day
Foursquare cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley just took the stage at , an Internet conference held in Paris, France, and noted the company now has 5 million users, is , and is seeing more than 2 million check-ins a day.
The company with a full team of engineers in San Francisco, California. The hiring is taking place in part to handle the company’s monthly user growth of 30 percent. While the company noted it had more than 4.5 million users at that time, Crowley updated this number today to 5 million total users.
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has close to 40 employees.
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