14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has released iOS 4.3.3 and iOS 4.2.8 earlier than expected in order to address several concerns related to the so-called location tracking feature in iPhones.
Last month two researchers warned that iPhones are storing information about wi-fi access points and cell towers they connected to, complete with their geographical position.
The researchers expressed concern that this data, which sometimes can stretch back over a year, can potentially be used to determine where an iPhone owner has been.
Furthermore, the file in which this information is stored, consolidated.db, was being saved on computers during the normal iTunes-assisted iPhone backup procedure.
The report led to a media firestorm and prompted official scrutiny in several countries. Apple addressed most questions in a FAQ document and pointed out that this data actually represents a small portion of the company's crowd-sourced cell tower and wi-fi hotspot database that gets cached on the phone.
The cache is used to determine the phone's location faster than just relying on GPS or when GPS is not available at all. The reason for its unusually large size was apparently a bug.
In the new iOS 4.3.3 and iOS 4.2.8, Apple fixes three issues regarding consolidated.db. First of all, the size of the cache has been greatly reduced.
Secondly, the file is no longer copied to computers during backup operations and third, it gets deleted when location services are turned off, something which didn't previously happen.
Another concern expressed by researchers was that this information is not encrypted. For the time being, this has remained unchanged, but Apple plans to encrypt the file in the next major iOS version expected this summer.
However, the wi-fi and cell tower location data collected by Apple from iPhones in order to build its crowd-sourced database, is sent in encrypted and anonymized form.