
iPhone Tracker - map a history of your iPhone's locations. - sahillavingia
http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
======
antirez
Better precision patch: <https://gist.github.com/932108>

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kikibobo69
I came to complain about the poor precision -- thanks!

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unfletch
The precision was limited intentionally. From the FAQ:

    
    
        To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data
        has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the
        data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you’ll see the points are
        constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying
        database has no such constraints, unfortunately.

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e03179
It would be cool if we could mash all of our locations together to see when we
were near each other and didn't know it. Perhaps I passed 10 redditors on the
road on the way to work this morning? Perhaps there were 6 HN'ers at the
Alabama Spring Football Game this weekend?

(Hey, the data is recorded. Could do something semi-cool with it.)

~~~
farout
There is a company that kinda does this already - say you are going be in SF
next week. And your friends also marked on their calendars they are visiting
SF - you can actually see them on a "future radar" so you schedule a meetup
with them. Kinda cool?

The company is Coloci <http://www.coloci.com/>

coloci helps friends share their future and current trips, activities, travel
plans and meetup face to face when they are in the same location or vicinity

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e03179
Sounds cool. And we'll be vacationing in SF not next week, but in three weeks!

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rb2k_
Google latitude also supports this feature (on Android at least). My inner
nerd craves the statistics :)

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nswanberg
How can you view a map of past locations in Latitude on Android? So far I've
only managed to find the stats page listing time at home vs work vs "out".

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rb2k_
For me this works:

<https://www.google.com/latitude/b/0/history/manage>

I think I had to enable this though

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nl
Lots of people miss the "Play" button (top right of the map). It's worth
pressing.

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kordless
When I run it, I get an error saying 'Couldn't load consolidated.db file from
/Users/user/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/'.

As far as I can tell, I have no directory called MobileSync on this computer.
I have backed up my iPhone several times to it though.

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jakewalker
I get the same error, although I _have_ the directory. I do keep my iTunes
library on another drive, though I can't imagine this is related.

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edjusted
Apparently it only works on _unencrypted_ backups. Here's what I did to make
it work: 1\. quit itunes 2\. go to the directory, temporarily rename the
random-string directory that has your encrypted iPhone backup (e.g. add zzz to
the beginning of the folder name) BE CAREFUL: make sure you can change it back
3\. open itunes and deselect "encrypt iphone backup" 4\. let it make an
unencrypted backup. you'll then be able to use the iPhoneTracker program 5\.
when you're done playing, go back to itunes and reselect encryption 6\. quit
itunes 7\. go back to the backup directory and delete the newly created,
unencrypted random-strings folder 8\. rename the old folder (from step 2) back
to its original name

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Joer14
I'm having issues deselecting "encrypt iphone backup". It's just grayed out.
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/899753/Screen%20shot%202011-04-20%20...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/899753/Screen%20shot%202011-04-20%20at%201.21.12%20PM.png)
Anyone have any tips? I feel like I'm doing something stupid here but I can't
seem to figure it out. Thanks Joe

~~~
cheungpat
Usually this is related to Configuration Profiles installed on device. Go to
Settings > General > Profiles to delete them. No need to delete Provisioning
Profiles.

~~~
jakewalker
Ahh, that's the problem. My law firm forces me to install a profile that
encrypts the backup. Fair enough.

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jonknee
It curiously thinks I was in New Orleans last December, but I haven't been
there in ages.

~~~
mortenjorck
It's giving me some strangely detailed results in Las Vegas, even following US
95, but I've never been there in my life. Meanwhile, none of the time I've
spent visiting the Bay Area is showing up. At home in Chicago, though, it all
looks about right.

Quite curious.

[update]

After scrolling through the timeline, it appears that my most recent Bay Area
trip coincides with the Las Vegas location data. What happens in SF stays in
Vegas?

~~~
mcdaid
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!

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dhollist
Has anyone had luck getting this working on a CDMA iPhone? I get the error
"Couldn't load consolidated.db file from '/Users/dhollist/Library/Application
Support/MobileSync/Backup'" even though the file IS there when using the
manual method outlined here: <http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/#2>

I believe the issue is that the location data is stored in the
CdmaCellLocation table, as opposed to the CellLocation table used in GSM
iPhones.

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Angostura
The best plausible explanation I've seen for the presence of this data came in
the comments section of a Register story.

The commenter says that, in order to calculate your position via cell-mast
triangulation, the iPhone has to retrieve the location of the mast from an
Apple-hosted database. Instead of repeatedly retrieving the same information,
it is cached locally, and that cache is what iPhone Tracker is tapping into.

~~~
rayval
There are two (relevant) tables in the SQL Lite database. One is called
CellLocation, the other is called WiFi Location.

The data collected includes:

    
    
        * Timestamp (in seconds since Jan 2001 GMT)
        * Latitude 
        * Longitude 
        * HorizontalAccuracy 
        * Altitude
        * VerticalAccuracy
        * Speed 
        * Course
        * Confidence
    

The above are self-explanatory. More opaque (to me, anyway) are the following:

    
    
        * PRIMARY
        * MNC
        * LAC
        * CI
        * MCC
    

If anyone has knowledge of what these mean, please post.

~~~
luu
Those are Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code, Cell Identity, and Mobile
Country Code.

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fredoliveira
This story (although pointing not to the source but an article on it) includes
some very good comments. In one, I suggested a few changes to the source which
improve the accuracy of the data, if you want to know just how much stuff the
iPhone's keeping track of. Interesting stuff.

Here's the other story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466445>

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uxp
Anyone else find it ironic that iPhoneTracker.app phones home (to an AWS ec2
server) upon startup?

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adw
I'm speculating it uses Pete Warden's OpenHeatMap (it's, like, a 20k
executable, it has to be pulling map data from somewhere).

~~~
uxp
It does as well in a separate request.

There are 3 request locations that I've spotted, at least one to
ajax.googlemaps.com, one to amazonaws.com and a few to openstreetmap.org
(a.tile.openstreetmap.org and static.openstreetmap.org). Open Street Map
provides the map tiles, a jQuery plugin and some CSS. ajax.googlemaps.com
provides jQuery itself. I haven't found what AWS actually provides. I just
thought it was amusing that this application designed to show off a "security
hole" that tracks the user has to use the network in order to work,
potentially tracking the user.

~~~
rayval
This is addressed in the FAQ.

<http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/#12>

The app downloads:

    
    
       * OpenStreetMap background tiles
       * jQuery main script file
       * OpenHeatMap script and CSS

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PatrickTulskie
It would only show the history of my iPad and not my iPhone. Neither backup is
encrypted so I'm not sure why it was having a problem. It looks interesting,
but it's hardly worth the sensationalism that it's currently receiving.

~~~
code_duck
I assume the interest is because this sort of record could be a potential gold
mine for law enforcement, stalkers, litigation, someone evil who finds your
phone on the street, and so on.

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RexRollman
Magic 8-Ball says: disturbing.

Seriously, Apple should offer some way to turn this off. At the very least,
the file should not be created if you are not allowing anything to access your
location information.

~~~
kamyulam
I agree. Does anyone know if there is a way to completely turn off location
data gathering?

I know we're all excited about the interesting applications of the
availability of this data, but what about the privacy implications? (Or is it
generally assumed that the fact that Apple is gathering this data is a bad
thing from a privacy perspective?) By no means am I opposed to them offering
this feature. It seems like it could be very useful. It's just a matter of
opt-in vs opt-out.

From the article: "The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in
an easily-readable form on your machine. Any other program you run or user
with access to your machine can look through it. The more fundamental problem
is that Apple are collecting this information at all. ..."

I'm not an iPhone user myself, though I'm likely to get one soon. Not sure if
this affects my purchase decision, which I suppose speaks volumes about the
current smartphone landscape.

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senthilnayagam
I could trace my home, office, all restaurants, coffeeshops, favourite parking
spots, felt like Will Smith in Enemy of the State

~~~
rflrob
For whatever reason, yours must have much better resolution than mine if you
can track favorite parking spots. The map I'm getting has, at best, a quarter
mile resolution or so, which means that in the moderately urbanized area where
I spend most of my time, I can get only hazy information about where I spend
my time.

~~~
senthilnayagam
I many times wait in my car, when my wife does shopping, so could identify it

The developer has reduced accuracy for location and time, to reduce the risk,
so if you change those with the source code you can get pretty much get
everything

