Privacy

Are you concerned that your iPhone or iPad apps are collecting personal data without your permission? Now thanks to a new app called Clueful you can safeguard your privacy and see exactly what your iOS apps are doing. Some apps track location, use your address book, send your credentials out unencrypted, and/or track usage.

Some functions in these apps can even keep your GPS or audio services running unnecessarily, which can drain your battery. Many apps ask for personal data they don't need, or in some cases link your behavior to a real identity such as a Facebook page.

Now that Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for a cool $1 billion, users are concerned about changes to the service. Even worse, some iPhone owners are concerned that Instagram will soon be inundated by advertisements or modify its privacy policies.

Even though the official statement by CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains that Facebook is "committed to building and growing Instagram independently," this hasn't alleviated everyone's privacy concerns. Luckily for them, there's still time to download all Instagram photos and quit the app forever.

Apple has finally addressed complaints that its mobile devices including the iPhone and iPad are tracking users by recording cellular tower triangulation data. The company issued a Q&A document to explain exactly what's happening on the devices they manufacture and how they plan to remedy the issues that even some members of Congress have expressed concerns over.

Apple is already facing lawsuits over the tracking issue, which was revealed by security researchers. Although individual devices have locally stored logs of location data going back as far as the installation of iOS 4.0, Apple insists that the company can't track individuals as any data it collects is anonymous and encrypted. According to the Q&A document, the purpose of these transmissions is to build better location based services and individual iPhones are never tracked at all.

Questions surrounding iPhone tracking have exploded recently thanks to the revelation that cellular-capable iOS 4 devices have been recording their location accurately and consistently since the firmware installation date. All of this location information is logged in a single file that can be parsed and mapped by the new iPhone Tracker application. Although some users don't care about this kind of thing, others are concerned and will want to stop their mobile device from logging location data.

As it turns out, turning off Location Services under Settings will not help, as this only controls the GPS chip inside the iPhone. Security researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan have discovered the location data comes from cellular network tower triangulation, which doesn't require communication with satellite GPS.

Reports that iPhones are tracking and storing your every move are causing some Congressional leaders concerned about privacy to question Apple's motives. Reactions to yesterday's revelations that a single unencrypted file on iPhones has been recording location data since the installation of iOS 4 has been mixed.

Some have reacted with amusement, looking at maps of their whereabouts using the open source iPhone Tracker software posted on the web by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden. Others are wary of Apple's purpose and concerned that this location data is routinely backed up to computers using iTunes.