Tech Newz

The iOS location tracking from Apple which has been caught recently is really become the worth taking issue for iPhone users. As already we have seen an app for that called ‘Untrackerd‘ to block or prevent Apple in-device iPhone location tracking. Finally, John Gruber from Daring Fireball, who is a renowned Apple critic believes that the iPhone location tracking data saved in a hidden file is actually a bug as Apple may not put it intentionally and it may overcome (fixed) in the next iOS 4.3.3 or iOS 4.3 update.

The big question of course, is why Apple is storing this information. 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. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.

Let me tell you if you still lacking behind from this, Security researchers revealed that Apple has tracking down iPhone user’s location and stores in a hidden secret file which is obviously not viewable to us.

The file contains data about your latitude and longitude along with the timestamp. This information can be easily accessed by jailbreaking the phone, unfortunately, on the computer even without that. Moreover, the file is not encrypted and can be read by just anyone using a simple app.

However, there is no official comment on this from Apple uptil now. Though, if it’s bug then it will take enough time to get fixed in the next iOS update as Apple has just already released iOS 4.3.2. In the mean time, you can prevent this issue by using ‘Untrackerd‘ jailbreak app which is available in the Cydia Store for free.