According to a presentation by two UK researchers at Where 2.0 conference, iOS4 devices constantly track and timestamp their location and dump that data into a file, which is shared with your desktop computer if you choose to backup your iPhone’s content. This presents a major potential for privacy breach.
For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010.
The two researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, offer an iPhone Tracker for download which let’s you retrieve and analyse the location data your iOS device has stored.
More information at O’Reilly.
(via Engadget, BoingBoing)