Report: iPhones track users’ every move

Everyone loves their iPhone, and the super-popular device loves secretly tracking your location.

A visualization of the location information captured on an iPhone, the author's trip from DC to New York.

According to an article on the tech site O’Reilly Radar, the new Apple iOS 4 appears to log customer locations and timestamps to a file called “consolidated.db.”

The file exists on iPhones and the 3G iPad and is secretly copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronized.

Why? The paranoid probably have some good ideas, but Apple has not responded to the query of authors Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden.

The duo have produced a video and have written an application that lets users see the data the phone has gathered about their travels.

Potentially, the unencrypted information stored on your phone or computer could be subpoenaed and used by law enforcement agencies.

Or, as a commenter said on the O’Reilly site, it’s getting more difficult for criminals to have cool phones.

The Guardian newspaper has also reported on this.