Over the past couple of days, there’s been a big fuss made over Apple’s ‘secret’ location tracker on the iPhone. Whilst everyone was huffing and puffing over privacy & security, i was delighted to hear it existed and was easily accessible via an app. However i was disappointed to discover the app would only run on Mac… (i sync my iPhone to my PC)…
Now a windows version
Thankfully, there is now a windows version of the app. So if you’re like em and sync to your iPhone via a PC, you can download it here.
It’s like latitude only it stores more and it’s offline
I use and embrace Google Latitude on my iPhone which basically detects my location and if i move, it’ll store my new location on google’s servers. The only problem is the ‘history’ only lasts for 90 days. This secret tracking database stored on the iPhone which has only been discovered (by the media) this week, records the iPhone’s coordinates with a timestamp, and triangulates your location via phone masts.
So one immediate advantage of this over google latitude is that you don’t need a connection for it to work… which means no roaming costs. Very handy if you’re travelling abroad. If only google (or apple) would allow you to import your database and store it online…
What have you got to hide
When it comes to privacy / security i’ve trained myself to ask myself the question ‘what am i hiding and why do i need to hide it?’ when giving my opinion on stuff like this. Do i care if potentially everyone knows where i am at any given time? Not really. Maybe i would do if i were a celebrity. I like the idea of being able to find out where i was at a certain time and date or see how far i travelled in 2010 or compare distance travelled over different months…
The advantages outweigh the disadvantages and like i said before i voluntarily use this kind of feature by using Google Latitude so to me, this is no big deal. This information is available anyway (to police for example), the only difference with the iPhone is that it’s stored locally and available to users (which we didn’t really know about until now).
I’ve also written a Windows app that does the same ! You should check it out !
http://www.raphaelabitbol.info/2011/04/22/iphone-tracker-sous-windows/
Good job! It shows exactly where I went in the past a week.
I just downloaded the app and ran it. Quite interresting. Most data correlates with my movements the last year or so, except for that it suggest that I wisited Bergen, Norway on March 24th. I was nowhere near, but in Trondheim and Oslo that day. So, the million-dollar question: If I’m a willon and the police confiscates my iPhone and tries to place me at a crime schene in Bergen that day. Am I in deep shit, or?
Another one here too : http://www.iphonelocationtracker.co.uk
I’m getting unhandled exceptions even with .net 4. Odd.
Strike that. It seems that if you encrypt your backups as I do, no traking software I tried can read your backups and lead to errors such as this. Untick encrypted backup and information is displayed as it should!
Yeah – if you encrypt your backups the tools don’t work.
yeah that would make sense all right 🙂 i’m much too lazy to do encryption on my own backups myself!
To use the iPhone tracking softweare of Mac and even Windows check out this post http://surreystore.com/cms/apple/47-iphone-tracker-app.html
odd, my map is blank. Am I doing something stupidly daft? I gather you just open the program and load the backup and then click on the play icon?
why the hell this app tries to connect external IP and send something out of my machine?
iPhone is so good ! iPhone tracker app for windows seemed interesting.
Because it has to exchange data with a server in order to display map data?
The app found the backups available but no iPhone movement data shows up.
how do u download the app for widows