11/20/2007, 10:15am, EST

Tuesday, November 20th

Heise: iPhone tracking concerns unfounded

Despite concerns, the iPhone is not sending gratuitous identifiers to Apple, a German publication reports. Warnings had been raised about binaries for the iPhone's Stocks and Weather applications, which appeared to be sending IMEI numbers to Apple URLs; these could in theory be used to pair a user with his web activity. It is now claimed through testing, though, that the iPhone does not send out its real IMEI, but rather codes unique to each application. The codes are also uniform across iPhones, meaning that they cannot be traced to a particular device.

Still unexplained is why nominally offline applications for Mac OS X and the iPod touch, such as Calculator, would require any sort of identifying tag. The programming may simply reflect the general architecture of the Mac OS, rather than constant attempts to send information to Apple.

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Feathers

disambiguation?

11/20, 11:08am, EST

To use wikipedia's term, is it possible that they are just different variables that happen to have the same name?

Forum Regular

Joined Oct 1999

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testudo

Heise

11/20, 11:21am, EST

What? We're supposed to trust these people? We found out a couple of weeks ago that they just spread FUD and rumor.

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Joined Aug 2001

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TheSnarkmeister

Yeah, right.

11/20, 12:53pm, EST

Apple is a big multi-national corporation, what do you think is the more likely explanation?

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Joined Jun 2007

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Swift

Calculator

11/20, 4:37pm, EST

Calculator on Leopard phones home to do things like catch the latest exchange rates. Does it do the same thing on the iPhone? The conclusive bit of evidence is that the signals are generic across all iPhones. So it can't be to identify, but rather work effectively. Hey, your cell phone sends out signals announcing its presence, and gets responses from the cell towers -- EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NOT CALLING!!! It does that so that when you dial, it already knows where to find the tower.

Please, you can't exist on a network without sending and receiving. I'm not holding Apple blameless automatically. But please, take off the tinfoil hats.

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UberFu

did anyone...

11/21, 10:49am, EST

pay any attention to Heise's attempt at 15 minutes of Spotlight Fame last week on this crap?

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Joined Oct 2002

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