The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program, researchers say.
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.
As with just about everything else related to advanced technology, the features can provide user benefit as well as danger. Where a person is, has been, and likes to go can be an important part of the "social graph," the accumulated network of interconnections among people, groups and organizations in a social network. The term refers to both the social network itself and a diagram representing the network.
Individuals and organizations, called actors, are nodes on the graph. Interdependencies, called ties, can be multiple and diverse, including such characteristics or concepts as age, gender, race, genealogy, chain of command, ideas, financial transactions, trade relationships, political affiliations, club memberships, occupation, education and economic status.
As you can well imagine, a social graph can be highly useful to people, brands advertising things to those people, ethnographers and product and application designers. But there are dangers to privacy and illegal use of such information, as well.
