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.

by MacNN Staff