Beware Apple spying your location

If you own an iPhone or Ipad then its very likely that Apple might know the details of all the places you have visited. It might sound scary but it’s true. Today at where 2.0, the latest discovery was made public. Apparently the recorded positions are stored into a hidden file called “consolidated.db”. The file contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. What’s alarming is that this file is unencrypted and unprotected and can be accessed by any application. So if an app developer is aware of this file then he has access to very critical information. This information can be used for various location based research/analysis.





Iam sure consumers will be appalled to know that Apple is recording there location. But is there anything that they can do, well looks like not much luck since Apple has clearly stated that they have rights to capture location information in the terms and conditions. Snippet below.

Location-Based Services

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.

Facebook gets Voice powered by T-Mobile

Well iam back, it’s been such a long time since I updated this blog. Professional and personal commitments kept me away from updating the blog. Sincere apologies to all the folks who had sent me mails requesting to start blogging again. Well Iam back. I guess year 2011 is turning out be to exciting times for startups. BTW, I have changed my blog address from latestgeeknews to 4Gwireless for all the good reasons. More on that later.


Coming back to the hot news that hit the stand today, T-Mobile and Vivox launched one touch- calling within Facebook called Bobsled. The new application provides 500 million Facebook users to call each other without worrying about knowing each other’s phone number. Bobsled is not the first application to provide this type of service. Jajah, Vonage and others have launched similar service earlier. In fact Skype and Facebook were rumored to be working closely to bring Voice and SMS integration. Also couple of months back there were rumors about Facebook testing its own Voice Chat.


So what does Bobsled offer, for now using Bobsled app Facebook users can place voice calls to all their friends through the Facebook chat with just one click. The application eliminates the need for dialing/remembering the phone number. Simply clicking the friends name will start the conversation. So with this app, users can call any of their across the globe for free. In addition to voice calling, the application will let you leave a voice message to your friends and family when they are not available. A cute little feature to leave happy birthday, anniversary etc voice greetings and post the greeting on friend’s wall for all to hear.

The initial feature set of Bobsled is limited. However in the near future, T-Mobile plans to unveil Video chat, call termination to mobile and landline and offer applications on smartphones and tablets across various mobile platforms.

Though we have seen similar services on Facebook, this one is big and important because it’s coming from an operator. What this means is that Operators are getting serious about Social Integration, and Bobsled app is a great leap forward in that direction. I was skeptical about voice calling widgets on Facebook few years back, iam thinking positive this time. I still root for Video Chat and am sure Facebook is working on it as I write this article.