Have you ever thought how safe your iPhone is? No biggie if you jailbreak it? Many people use their iPhone for many purposes. Business, online, Facebook, emails, online shopping. You name it; most probably iPhone can do it. But what if suddenly people tell you that it’s not safe to do it?

Jail-breaking your iPhone is a form of hacking it, to allow the device to do some feat that it is not able to do, or supposed to do if you know what I mean. The iPhone is a great device, and it’s widely used worldwide. But that’s not it. The catch that the iPhone may be a target of hackers is not only because of the mass market, but also because most of them that are capable of owning an iPhone are most probably coming from mid-income and above. Do you think someone who earns $3 per hour will be able to get an iPhone and commit to a 2-years data plan contract? No. You need to be at least earning some decent and stable income in order to carry one around, and imagine millions of such people using the same device worldwide. I bet any hackers would want to get personal info of this group and sell it for big bucks. No surprise if jail-breaking your iPhone includes planting a key logger or malware into your iPhone.

When Apple addressed a congressional investigation on privacy in July regarding their iDevice, the company claimed that nobody could essentially track any specific iPhone in real time, as its transactions were deemed anonymous and thoroughly randomized. However, not everyone agrees on this. Bucknell University network admin Eric Smith, theorizes that third-party application developers and advertisers may not have the same pangs, and could be linking your device to your name (and even your location) whenever they transmit data. Smith, a two-time DefCon wardriving champ, studied 57 top applications in the iTunes App Store to see what they sent out, and discovered that some fired off the iPhone’s UDID and personal details in plaintext (where they can ostensibly be intercepted), including those for Amazon, Chase Bank, Target and Sam’s Club, though a few were secured with SSL. Though UDIDs are routinely used by apps to store personal data and combat piracy, what Smith fears is that a database could be set up linking these UDIDs to GPS coordinates or GeoIP, giving nefarious individuals or organizations knowledge of where you are. Read more about it over here (PDF).