The Map Room

Some developments on the iPhone/iPad tracking story since I last posted. For now, I’ll just refer you to the links.

First, Peter Batty’s must-read posts on the subject: So actually, Apple isn’t recording your (accurate) iPhone location; More on Apple recording your iPhone location history; The scoop: Apple’s iPhone is NOT storing your accurate location, and NOT storing history.

A follow-up from the original researchers: Additional iPhone tracking research (O’Reilly Radar).

Opinion: Mike Elgan at Computerworld; Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac on Why You Should Care About the iPhone Location-Tracking Issue.

Today, Apple has posted a Q&A on the issue: they say it’s a cache of a subset of a larger hotspot and cell tower database, not location tracking.

This could be interesting. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden report today at Where 2.0 that they’ve discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads have been recording their positions and storing them in one large — unencrypted — tracklog file, and are raising the alarm at the privacy implications. “Anybody with access to this file knows where you’ve been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released.” They’ve yet to hear back from Apple on this. The basic questions: what is the purpose of collecting this data, and why is it being stored in this (possibly insecure) manner?

Mashable has infographics from TeleNav showing what people search for on their GPS receivers, based on anonymous data from 20 million subscribers.

Yesterday, Google announced that Google Latitude can now be accessed directly from a desktop web browser at google.com/latitude; previously, the only way to use Latitude on a computer was via an iGoogle widget. It remains to be seen whether this will increase the usage of this service. It’s telling for me that no one on my (very small) Latitude friends list has checked in for months (myself included).

The announcement of Facebook Places frankly reminds me of the last rollout of location services by an Internet giant: Google Latitude.

1. The media freaks out about the privacy implications (see Lifehacker on how to disable the feature).
2. Hardly anyone can use the service because of national or technical limitations: Facebook Places is U.S.-only, and can only be used from the updated iPhone Facebook app or from their mobile-browser-optimized website (which requires a device with an HTML5 compatible browser and a GPS — so I can use it with my 3G iPad, if I were in the U.S.).
3. Of that subset of U.S. iPhone and HTML5-with-GPS users on Facebook, few will actively want to use it. (As with Latitude, the only people I’ve seen use it so far are people in the geospatial industry.)

The sort of people who have no qualms about sharing their location — who are eager to do so — are already using Gowalla, Foursquare and so forth; Facebook didn’t get to be Facebook by being dumb, so those services are integrated into Places.

From what I’ve been reading, the privacy critique of Facebook is essentially as follows:

1. It’s on by default.
2. By default, your friends can tag your location (which invites mischief and embarrassment).
3. Private locations (like someone’s home) can become public and can’t then be removed from the location database.

I’ve already got friends concerned about this, even though Places isn’t available in Canada yet. This isn’t the first time a move by Facebook has generated privacy worries, but this is precisely the sort of thing that can cripple the rollout of geolocation services. The benefits offered by this sort of thing — serendipitous meetups — aren’t important enough to outweigh those concerns for enough people.

Not everyone is comfortable sharing their precise location, even with their friends; if you’re not, you may well wonder why people actually use location-based social networks like Foursquare or Google Latitude, or enable location sharing on Twitter or (soon) Facebook….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s an interesting piece on privacy and geolocation services. Some excerpts: “When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. … On the other end…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Geolocation is apparently coming to Facebook next month. “The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apple says that iPhone developers should not use Core Location, the API that provides an iPhone user’s location, just to provide location-targeted ads. Ed Parsons and GPS Review have what I think is the correct take on this: if you’re…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Pilgrim on the geolocation API in HTML 5, which is only supported by a couple of browsers at the moment (Firefox 3.5, the iPhone, and Android). When and where it is supported, though, a user’s location can be acquired…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A little reality check for those worried about Google Latitude and the like: in the U.S., your mobile phone location data is already available to law enforcement. At ISS World, it was revealed that Sprint Nextel, with 50 million customers,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Twitter geotagging is now officially available, though only through the API — which means that third-party applications can do things with it, but it won’t show up in the web interface. It’s off by default; users have to enable it….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Valleywag thinks Google Latitude’s location history feature (previously) is creepy: “Google said it can now keep a detailed list of everywhere you go, play your trips back like movies and generate ‘alerts’ for unusual movements. Who wants this? The CIA?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I should have waited: this Google LatLong post summarizes all the Street View updates: not only Hawaii and Mexico, but also Spain and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Latitude has added a couple of features: history and alerts. Not to disrespect the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Twitter is working on adding location to tweets: We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There’s a lot of web commentary trying to figure out why Apple rejected Google’s Latitude as a standalone application (which might have allowed for background processes and real-time updating), restricting it to a web application accessed via the browser (see…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two items from the world of location services: Google Latitude is now available for the iPhone, via the onboard web browser (which supports location services) rather than the maps application; it doesn’t run in the background, so it won’t update…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Clive Thompson’s piece on location services makes a point I was planning on making in a future piece, damn him, as he looks at how location services may transform the Web: The whole reason the Web revolutionized the world was…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The iPhone’s version of Safari supports geolocation with the 3.0 software update, and it’s apparently trivial to write the code to access a user’s location; I wonder if it’s this easy with Firefox 3.5….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate 1) adds geolocation as a new feature: it calculates a user’s location based the user’s IP address and nearby wireless access points; location-aware sites can then access that location if the user grants permission. Details here….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Web comic xkcd’s take on Google Latitude’s privacy implications is … about what you’d expect. And as succinct an explanation as there will likely ever be of why location services will probably never take off….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yahoo announced its new Placemaker web service at Where 2.0 last week. Placemaker takes unstructured data, extracts references to places, and returns geographic metadata — take a reference to Chicago in a block of text, for example, and it gives…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has added a couple of applications to Latitude, allowing users to embed their location data on a Web page or in their Google Talk status update; KML and GeoJSON feeds are also available for hackers and developers who want…  •  Continue reading this entry.

For location services like Google Latitude to succeed, Tom Arran argues in GPS Business News, their users need to be able to trust them; for that to happen, adequate safeguards need to be in place. He points to four emerging…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As a preview of his talk at next month’s Where 2.0 conference, Yahoo’s Geo Technologies lead Tyler Bell sits down for a long interview with O’Reilly Media’s James Turner, in which they discuss Yahoo’s behind-the-scenes geo technologies (e.g., geotagging on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

To be honest, I haven’t been paying close attention to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle geolocation service, but since I reported on it a year ago it’s accumulated 70 applications that use it, integrating Fire Eagle location data with everything from Movable…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stefan Geens of Ogle Earth compares Google Latitude with GMap-Track, a service he’s been using on his site. “Letting your mobile phone update your location at all times can be useful among close-knit groups of trusted friends in urban settings…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Analysts, observers and pundits are trying to grapple with the implications of Google’s Latitude, which is apparently new enough to confound our expectations about location awareness and privacy. Privacy International says that security flaws could endanger user privacy: “PI has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

PC World’s J. R. Raphael offers three reasons he won’t be using Google Latitude: “Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want every aspect of my life to be public domain — even when it comes to my close friends and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Latitude is a friend-tracking tool for mobile devices; it’s also an iGoogle gadget. Using a mobile device’s built-in GPS (or manual updates), it shows the location of at least those friends who’ve added themselves to the service. See the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Facebook app whereyougonnabe? gets an upgrade focusing on integration with other platforms (previously). Diana Eid takes a look at map art, focusing on three artists we’ve seen before: Matthew Cusick, Elisabeth Lecourt and Susan Stockwell (via GeoCarta). On the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday, Peter Batty announced a new social-networking application that operates within Facebook: whereyougonnabe? In beta (naturally), this app lets you map your current and future activities and see what (and where) your friends are doing at the same time. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

FireEagle is a new Yahoo service. (In beta, of course.) It’s a user-geolocation service with privacy controls that can tie into other applications; think of it as a Twitter for geographic coordinates. It’s one of those things, like RSS, whose…  •  Continue reading this entry.