In a post this morning, Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber says that the tracking data stored by your iPhone and 3G iPad is a bug that will likely soon be fixed.
Citing a “little birdie” (friend inside Apple), Gruber says the consolidated.db file is a supposed to be temporary cache of location data (As we reported yesterday).However, because of a bug — or more likely, a programming mistake — the file isn’t purged of historical data.
I don’t have a definitive answer, but my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history.
Gruber bets the oversight will be fixed in the next iOS update. Apple still hasn’t officially commented on the issue, which is a big story in the mainstream press today.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
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13 responses to “iPhone Tracking Is a Bug, Says Gruber”
Just saying, if this was an “oversight”, then why wasn’t it fixed four months ago, in any of the 3 updates released since then, when it was first reported?
It’s not a bug, they just got caught, so now its a bitch!!
A bug or a class action lawsuit? Is it always a bug when you are worried your customers may get some money back?
I’m sure there are groups lawyers trying to find a way to get a suit going to make some money…. I mean protect the public….
Apple has a lot of explanation to do with this tracker program. I think that it is not up to them to decide whether people want to collect data of their previous locations. Although it is not that alarming, I still find it weird that this company has thought of this idea. Maybe they are trying a new application, nobody knows! It’s like they made consumers a guinea pig regarding their little experiment.
Gruber’s an Apple apologist. He’s always covering for them.
I’m calling BS on this “bug”. I don’t doubt for one second that Apple was doing this intentionally. This isn’t something as minor as a missed buffer overflow, and it’s very likely that most or all of their code goes through multiple reviews so someone would’ve found & corrected this already if it wasn’t an intended “feature”.
WHAT?
Either Gruber is an idiot or a liar or both… This is much more than a simple bug… Apple is not that lame…
Gruber must have been asleep when he wrote this…..