Researchers at the University of Exeter discovered that iPhones using the latest operating system keeps detailed records of where you've been.
"Apple has made it possible for almost anybody — a jealous spouse, a private detective — with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," Warden told The Guardian.
The researchers say there is no evidence that the data is being transmitted to Apple or any other company.
If you're really interested in getting into the guts of this, O'Reilly has posted a 20-minute video of the researchers explaining how they found what they found; that's below. But they've also released a piece of free software
http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
that will take this info from your iPhone and map it for you.
Apple said they take great care to protect users' privacy and it allows users to turn-off location based services. On an iPhone, they point out, you go to your settings and turn off location services.
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.
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. 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.
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