SAN FRANCISCO: Privacy watchdogs are demanding answers from Apple Inc. about why iPhones and iPads are secretly collecting location data on users – records that cellular service providers routinely keep but require a court order to disgorge. It's not clear if other smartphones and tablet computers are logging such information on their users. And this week's revelation that the Apple devices do wasn't even new – some security experts began warning about the issue a year ago. But the worry prompted by a report from researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at a technology conference in Santa Clara, California, raises questions about how much privacy you implicitly surrender by carrying around a smartphone and the responsibility of the smartphone makers to protect sensitive data that flows through their devices. Much of the concern about the iPhone and iPad tracking stems from the fact the computers are logging users' physical coordinates without users knowing it – and that that information is then stored in an unencrypted form that would be easy for a hacker or a suspicious spouse or a law enforcement officer to find without a warrant. A central question in this controversy is whether a smartphone should act merely as a conduit of location data to service providers and approved applications – or as a more active participant by storing the data itself, to make location-based applications run more smoothly or help better target mobile ads or any number of other uses. Location data is some of the most valuable information a mobile phone can provide, since it can tell advertisers not only where someone's been, but also where they might be going – and what they might be inclined to buy when they get there. Allan said in an email to the AP that he and Warden haven't looked at how other smartphones behave in this regard, but added there's suspicion that phones that run Google Inc.'s Android software might behave in a similar way and is being investigated. The existence of the location-data file on the phone is alarming because it's unencrypted, the researchers said, which means that anyone with access to the device can see it.Charlie Miller, a prominent iPhone hacker, said a security change that Apple made last month would make extracting the file from the phone in a remote attack very difficult. Even if an attacker were to break into someone's phone looking for the file, he wouldn't have the right privileges to access the file. But it's a different matter when the data is transferred to another computer in a backup. If the backup computer is infected with malicious software, the file could easily be located and sent to the hacker.
