Heise: iPhone tracking concerns unfounded
updated 10:15 am EST, Tue November 20, 2007
iPhone not tracking IMEI?
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.
disambiguation?
11/20, 11:08am reply
To use wikipedia's term, is it possible that they are just different variables that happen to have the same name?
Feathers
Forum Regular
Joined: Oct 1999
Heise
11/20, 11:21am reply
What? We're supposed to trust these people? We found out a couple of weeks ago that they just spread FUD and rumor.
testudo
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2001
Yeah, right.
11/20, 12:53pm reply
Apple is a big multi-national corporation, what do you think is the more likely explanation?
TheSnarkmeister
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jun 2007
Calculator
11/20, 04:37pm reply
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.
Swift
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Joined: Aug 2003
did anyone...
11/21, 10:49am reply
pay any attention to Heise's attempt at 15 minutes of Spotlight Fame last week on this c***?
UberFu
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Joined: Oct 2002