Researchers’ discovery demonstrates that Apple users don’t really own their devices

Two secu­ri­ty researchers inves­ti­gat­ing visu­al uses for geolo­ca­tion data revealed today that gad­get giant Apple has been secret­ly ship­ping spy­ware inside of its mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem (iOS) that con­stant­ly records its cus­tomers’ whereabouts.

The dis­cov­ery, which has ignit­ed a firestorm of crit­i­cism, was first made pub­lic at O’Reil­ly Radar by the researchers (Alas­dair Allan and Pete War­den) pri­or to being announced onstage at Where 2.0, a con­fer­ence about the “busi­ness of loca­tion”, present­ly tak­ing place in San Francisco.

To us and oth­er crit­ics of Apple, the dis­cov­ery is a grim con­fir­ma­tion of our long­stand­ing sus­pi­cions about the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness prac­tices and policies.

Over the years, we have repeat­ed­ly con­demned Apple for mar­ket­ing and sell­ing gad­gets which its cus­tomers can­not ful­ly con­trol, except by jail­break­ing (which voids the war­ran­ty). Now we find out that Apple has pro­grammed all of its devices to track its users’ move­ments.

And to be clear, we’re not talk­ing about a list of gen­er­al loca­tions. No, we’re talk­ing coor­di­nates for lon­gi­tude and lat­i­tude, plus pre­cise time­stamps, near­by Wi-Fi net­works, and oth­er information.

Shock­ing­ly, all of this infor­ma­tion that Apple’s devices col­lect­ing is being stored in an unen­crypt­ed file, which means a thief with hack­ing skills can eas­i­ly map the move­ments of any per­son they can steal an iPhone or iPad from.

(War­den has released an open-source appli­ca­tion that allows iPhone users to map the infor­ma­tion that their device is record­ing about them. It’s pret­ty amazing).

The researchers stress that at this time, it does­n’t appear that iOS devices are “phon­ing home” to Cuper­ti­no with this data. But that’s no con­so­la­tion. Undoubt­ed­ly, Apple has the capa­bil­i­ty to remote­ly com­mand any device that has this infor­ma­tion to trans­mit it to servers under its control.

If what Apple is doing isn’t ille­gal, it should be. No doubt who­ev­er designed and imple­ment­ed this spy­ware checked with Apple’s lawyers to make that it is cov­ered under the “end user license agree­ment”, or EULA, that a user must agree to after pur­chas­ing and acti­vat­ing one of Apple’s devices. If true, it does­n’t mean Apple is com­plete­ly pro­tect­ed against lit­i­ga­tion over this, but it will make it dif­fi­cult for any out­raged cus­tomers to get jus­tice in a court of law.

The time has come for Con­gress to step in and act to ensure that Amer­i­cans’ right to pri­va­cy is pro­tect­ed from unac­count­able cor­po­ra­tions like Apple, Google, and Face­book, which con­tin­ue to invent new excus­es to jus­ti­fy their unac­cept­able busi­ness prac­tices. These com­pa­nies are wag­ing war on the very idea of a right to pri­va­cy. They are mak­ing the Inter­net, and all of us, less secure in the process.

Apple’s deci­sion to join Google and Face­book in this race to the bot­tom is espe­cial­ly iron­ic con­sid­er­ing that Apple is respon­si­ble for one of the most famous cul­tur­al ref­er­ences to the works of George Orwell: the famous 1984 ad.

Less than thir­ty years after pro­duc­ing that ad, Apple increas­ing­ly resem­bles the Big Broth­er-esque enti­ty it once appealed to Amer­i­cans to reject.

Legal­ly, the hard­ware that Apple sells belongs to the peo­ple who buy it. Prac­ti­cal­ly, how­ev­er, the hard­ware that Apple sells remains under its con­trol well after a cus­tomer takes pos­ses­sion of it, because the soft­ware answers to Apple, not the user. And Apple’s poli­cies are draconian.

For instance, only non-free soft­ware that Apple approves of can be down­loaded and installed on its devices. Apple’s terms even pro­hib­it the dis­tri­b­u­tion of soft­ware released under copy­left through its App Store.

The Library of Con­gress has ruled that jail­break­ing an iPhone or iPad is legal, but less than ten per­cent of Apple’s cus­tomers report­ed­ly jail­break their devices.

Peo­ple who buy Apple’s gad­gets are thus more like renters than owners.

And Alas­dair Allan and Pete War­den’s dis­cov­ery just affirms that. Apple’s track­ing is being con­duct­ed invol­un­tar­i­ly. The only way to opt out is to not use iOS at all. So much for free­dom from conformity.