Apple spy probs heat up - devices used for govt spying!

As I blogged yesterday, if you have an iPhone or iPad, Apple is potentially spying on you. Ditto if you save iPhone or iPad info to a Mac computer.

I saw this and said, "just wow." In the consumer part of the tech world, Apple, even more than Google, has a reputation (though not totally deserved even before this) of being "good guys."

No longer, eh?

Not only is Apple sniffing out and tracking your location, the data it gets from that is unencrypted.

I said yesterday that people are surely waiting on Steve Jobs to explain this.

So far, crickets.

But, another information security analyst makes three interesting claims, the last the worst.

1. This isn't new or secret. Supposedly, according to Alex Levinson, it's been on older versions of Apple devices and so reported.

2. Apple isn't keeping this data. That's even asother researchers claim the tracking is likely a mistake, which gives us two other issues.
A. If it's a mistake, then why's it been on Apple devices in previous generations?
B. If it's NOT a mistake, why should we believe Apple isn't collecting this data? Remember, it's competing more and more, if indirectly, with Google for online advertising.

3. This isn't listed as a separate point; Levinson's actual point 3 recapitulates Point 1. But, here's Levinson giving us the Orwellian secret, per Financial Times:

Through my work with various law enforcement agencies, we’ve used h-cells.plist on devices older than iOS 4 to harvest geolocational evidence from iOS devices.

WTF??

An information security analyst has been helping police departments spy on people's locations!

Levinson adds:
When the iPhone 4 came out, I was one of the first people in San Francisco to grab one.
Well, of course. You needed the latest generation of your spy tool.

Per his bio, Levinson advises both governments and private businesses.

Another blogger has already followed up on these ideas in an interview with Levinson.

Levinson declined to divulge the names of those agencies (whom he had advised), but told me that he had worked with “multiple state and federal agencies both in the U.S. and internationally.”

So, what other governments are snooping on iPhone users? In response to my initial blog post, a friend in Japan said she'd be far from labeling Apple as "evil." Want to at least partially rethink?

And, speaking of corporations ...

Let's see, a corporation could give all its employees iPads or iPhones as a perk, or a work tool, then spy on them. How much more Orwellian can this get? (Wait, I'm not sure I want to know.)

Given all this, and assuming this isn't a "mistake," it's no wonder we hear just crickets, not Steve Jobs, at Cupertino, Calif.

That all said, there is an app to stop this. You have to jailbreak your iPhone first. (I assume this all applies to iPads, too.)

More here on what may also be a Fourth Amendment violation against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Update, April 23: First, Apple has already spoken, indirectly, about this issue in the past, but it's still not talking now.

Among its claims is that it "decouples" the GPS tracking data it gets from individual phones. Well, if that's the case, then why can't it also create a way for that data to be erased from the original phone after 12 hours, if a jailbreak app can do that and more.

Second, not so smug from Jobs haters. Some Android phones do the same thing.