Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.
Though it wasn’t in our readers’ top 10, Apple named Localscope the best navigation app of 2011. Yeah, well they ain’t seen nuthin’ — its new update adds a whole new exploratory facet to the app that’s arguably cooler than the app’s original focus.
The big news today is all about how Apple has apparently been busy secretly squirreling away data about your movements on your iPhone 4 or GPS-equipped iPad, and storing it in a file on your computer via syncing. Is this a big deal, or business as usual, just a giant tech company doing its thing?
Okay, this is sorta creepy — and if you aren’t aware of this little fact by now, you should be: Unless you’ve adjusted the settings to turn this feature off, every time you snap a photo with your iPhone it embeds data with your exact location in the image file. This data, called a geotag, can be easily read using easily available software by anyone who has access to your images online (btw, contrary to what the folks at NBC say, it’s not new technology; the ability to geotag photos has been around since at least the first iPhone to include GPS, the 3G).