By now you may have already heard what's been making headlines lately with the iPhone. Some computer savvy individuals have found a file called "consolidated.db" in the iPhone that show your iDevice secretly recording your movements using GPS. This file is said to include latitude and longitude of every place you've ever been since the phone was turned on. Though this data is only stored on the phone and not transmitted to Apple, the news has picked up this story and gotten a lot of people worried.

Now, I would agree that any secret tracking program is a bit creepy. But at the same time, having a running journal of where I've been is kinda cool. I decided to see exactly what kind of data my phone was saving before making any judgments on whether this was actually cool or creepy.

I followed the instructions on this site for finding the GPS file on my phone. These instructions are for Windows machines. Finding the file is a bit easier on Mac OSX, in the case that you sync your phone with a Mac. But either way I was able to find the "consolidated.db" file, export the latitude/longitude data into a CSV file, and then convert that into a Google KML file. The Google KML file played very nice with Google Maps (obviously). But at that point I became a bit disappointed.

Let me just say that the data is not what the news is making it out to be. The data points are so obscure and inaccurate. Of the 5000 data points that my iPhone recorded, none of them even closely recorded where my apartment is, where my parents' house is, or even where my workplace is. I thought that the phone might have tracked me on the MS150, but some of the recent points have me on I-10 close to San Antonio. Not even close! News sites have been recording the scary nature of a suspicious spouse or jealous boyfriend tracking their significant others by looking at this data. Yeah, there's no way.

Here's a screenshot of what the data looks like. The Google map doesn't show all the markers at once. Google parses the data points into pages of 200 points each, so there's 25 pages of data points.

My understanding is that the iPhone records this GPS data up to a certain size and then starts to delete the oldest data points. My GPS data does record me being in San Francisco and San Jose, which could either be back to January or even November. Anyways, seeing all these data points on the map is pretty interesting, but it doesn't really register on the cool or creepy scale for me. Sorry, conspiracy theorists.

If you're interested in seeing the actual Google Map I generated, let me know and I'll send you the link. I didn't want to post it publicly in case someone decided to get some creepy ideas to use my data against me.