Your iPhone Knows Where You Were Last Night. Who Else Knows?

We recently announced that it's time for a privacy check-in for location-based services and mobile devices. Apparently Apple didn't get the memo, as its latest iPhone and iPad regularly record your location in a hidden file. Join us and tell Apple that you demand control over your sensitive location information!

As we discussed at our panel yesterday at Where 2.0, user trust is critical for a company's long-term health. If users don't trust your service, or if regulators or the press get wind of privacy violations, the consequences can range from fines and lawsuits to the death of your product entirely. (Just ask Google how Buzz worked out for them.) Yet initial reports suggest that Apple appears to be recording your location without any kind of notice or control.

These location records can reveal a wealth of sensitive information about you: your attendance at a gun rally or prayer meeting, your frequent visits to a health clinic, and more. Control over this information needs to be in your hands, not Apple's. Not only that, Apple is storing this information in an unencrypted file, which means that anyone with technical know-how -- from your partner or parent to an overzealous school security officer -- could access this information.

If there's any good to come of this, it's that this practice will force Apple to answer some tough questions. We're also seeing, once again, that the developer community cares about privacy -- the same researchers who announced this issue have also produced an app that might help you understand just how much information your iPhone or iPad has collected. That's exactly the kind of thing we are trying to encourage with our Develop 4 Privacy Challenge!

You shouldn't have to choose between using an iPhone or iPad and keeping control of your location information. Please sign our petition for transparency and tell Apple and other companies that you, and not they, need to be the one with ultimate control over your own personal information.

Chris Conley is the Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow with the ACLU of Northern California.