Location data tracked by iOS and Android devices

Security researchers discovered this week that iOS devices continuously track users physical location and store this data on the device. The data is also sync’d with your desktop if you use iTunes. What’s interesting is apparently this has been long known by Law Enforcement Agencies, who can use this data in investigations. This data is also transmitted back to Apple every 12 hours.

Android devices apparently also report location data back to Google – it sounds like WiFi MAC address location data is sent back to help triangulate a users location to provide location based services using this map of collected MAC addresses. This is similar to the MAC address collection that Google got into trouble for when they collected similar data from their StreetView cars (when they arguably collected far more than just MAC addresses and the location).

April Fools roundup

I’ve only spotted one so far this morning, but this one’s a good one:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html

Amazon beat Apple and Google and launch their cloud-based music service

Google and Apple have long been rumored to be working on cloud based music storage/streaming services, but neither have yet announced anything definite. Google talked about their new service a year ago but nothing has showed up yet (other than someone finding the code for the service in a version of Android and this week’s rumor that they have begun testing internally). Apple meanwhile have been busy building a massive data center, but no details on what they will use it for.

Well, Amazon has beaten them both to it and this morning announced their new Amazon Cloud Drive service, which allows you to store your files on their servers and access from anywhere.

Strange when you think how several years back the original mp3.com site offered a ‘locker service’ to keep your music online, but we just weren’t ready to access music remotely at that point, and so it disappeared.