Big Brother is watching... well, not exactly

Researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan have discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads regularly record your position into a hidden file. Ever since you upgraded to iOS 4, your device has been storing a long list of latitude-longitude coordinates and timestamps. The presence of this data on your iPhone, your iPad, and your backups could have some serious privacy implications, and to make matters worse, the file with said data is unencrypted and unprotected, and it's also on any machine you've synced with your iOS device. If your device is stolen, the perpetrator can jailbreak it and easily access the file in question (called consolidated.db), and will be able to see where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was released. This is a very big security concern indeed, and unless Apple have a good reason for collecting this data, they should fix this in some way, maybe encrypt the file on the next iOS release.