Newly revealed patent applications prove beyond a doubt what I have suspected all along: that Steve Jobs is a fucking lunatic. For some reason he would like to know where you are at any given moment, as well as everywhere you have ever been
before this moment. Check it:
Ronald Huang, an Apple senior engineering manager, filed patent application 12/553,554 last month, "Location histories for location aware devices," which explains how Apple can amass and use location data in the very ways Apple critics fear. The patent application, for example, envisions a searchable map plotting the owner's location history; tying location to financial transactions; transmitting location data over the internet to remote servers; and many other uses.
Apple has been enmeshed in controversy since computer researchers disclosed last month that the iPhone stores indefinitely data about its whereabouts gleaned from cell phone towers and wifi access points. The data collection started with the release of iOS 4 last June. The iPhone puts the location data in an easily read file called "consolidated.db," which is apparently never pruned for old entries.
Privacy advocates, politicians and the press have loudly raised concerns about how this extensive history of personal movements is going to be used. Senator Al Franken and Rep. Ed Markey, for example, both wrote letters to Apple demanding to know why the location dossiers are being created, and today the Illinois attorney general followed suit. The information is also collected even if the iPhone's "location services" preference is set to "off," the Wall Street Journal reported this morning.
Where the fuck was Glenn Beck on this one? Here we have an actual conspiracy of
highly questionable legality to spy on everyday people, and Beck has not committed word one to chalkboard.
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