Last week the blogosphere and news sites exploded with Apple’s iOS on the iPhone 4 tracking the location of their owners and saving all the info on a file called ‘consolidated.db’, which is openly available and not encrypted. However, not many know how it worked, and how efficient it is to collect your ‘traveling interest’.

The most common criticism was that the contents of the SQLite file, which is stored on the phone and on any computer backups, were wildly imprecise. Blogger and web developer Will Clarke, for instance, used the researchers’ freely available software to map the coordinates gathered by his own iPhone during a recent round-trip bike tour he took from Philadelphia to New Jersey. When he compared the results to the actual route, he found that “almost all the points were way off.” He mentioned that some of the points on the resulting map were as much as 3,000 meters, or almost two miles, away from his true location.

“The data that is exposed basically reveals which city you were in at a given time,” he concluded in a post that called the research “sensational.” “Nothing more specific than that. It can’t tell what house you live in, it can’t tell what route you jog on, nothing like that.”

Software analyst David “Lefty” Schlesinger found similar inaccuracies when he used the database contents of his iPhone to plot a train ride he took in July from Amsterdam to Den Haag, about 60 kilometers away. He also found that the iPhone file showed he was in Santa Cruz, California, on Christmas Day and traveled as much as 80 miles, when in fact he stayed in the state’s Central Valley, some 130 miles away, the entire day.

The tracking system is not actually tracking your exact location using GPS, but more of storing the location of the towers that the device is communicating with. They said the exact latitude and longitude plotted on a map is accurate to about 500 meters in areas where there are many cellphone nodes and as much as 4 kilometers with fewer nodes.

“It really does seem to be dependent on how good your cell coverage is,” Allan said. “If you’re in a big city like downtown San Francisco, the positioning is going to be much better. If you’re in the middle of London, the positioning is going to be much better. If you’re in a rural or semi-rural area, your positions are going to be much rougher.”

Also, the device is not exactly actively detecting your location. The time intervals between the updates of your location are hugely inconsistence. Sometimes iPhones and iPads went days without updating the database and on one occasion went almost two weeks.

SOURCE via The Register