Apple hit by GPS scandal

Security researchers unveiled the scandalous discovery that Apple’s iPhone and iPad are recording the user’s geographic location to a secret file.

Revealing the discovery at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden said that iPhone and iPad have been "storing a long list of locations and time stamps" ever since the iOS 4 update.

"We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations," they wrote on the O’Reilly Radar blog.

The researchers also showed that the data file was "unencrypted and unprotected" and is transferred to any computer that has been synched with an iOS device. The file can be accessed on the iPhone or iPad.

Sister site PCR has the full story.