iPhone "Tracking" Database

Posted on April 20, 2011

My news feeds have been alive today with reports that Apple is tracking all users of iOS devices, or at least recording information about where a device goes on the local file system. From an article at ZDNet to the original article about the software that can extract your location history and plot it on a map, there has been a lot written about the tracking aspect, and questions about the purpose of the data. The FAQ on the Pete Warden site even has this question & answer: Why is Apple collecting this information? It’s unclear. One guess might be that they have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that’s pure speculation. The fact that it’s transferred across devices when you restore or migrate is evidence the data-gathering isn’t accidental. What I find interesting is that nothing I’ve read so far mentions that the majority of the tables in the database (it is an unencrypted SQLite database for those wondering) concern cell tower and WiFi access point locations. Of particular interest are these two tables: CREATE TABLE WifiLocation (MAC TEXT, Timestamp FLOAT, Latitude FLOAT, Longitude FLOAT, HorizontalAccuracy FLOAT, Altitude FLOAT, VerticalAccuracy FLOAT, Speed FLOAT,…