Location Data Tracking Woes

There is a lot of media attention about the mobile phone location data tracking, kicked off by the really well made "gotcha" video by Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan. It's like a talk show, very relaxed. They developed a Mac application to visualize the data, and in the meantime there are also Windows versions around. I checked it out today, and sure enough, it works. It came up with more than 6,000 locations since June 2010. The picture below shows the simple fact that I never carried the iPhone south of the equator - I was basically sticking to the US, Europe and Japan. The data accuracy is quite good: in a more detail view I could see my airport transfers in Chicago and Philadelphia. It is sad that such data is possibly exposed without much reason (like: why store that stuff, even when changing phones, or why capturing more than a few days). On the other hand, this data is certainly also available from your favorite carrier. It may or may not be better protected there, but in any case, it will be hard to escape.