That report about Apple secretly mining iPhone users for all sorts of data by phoning home personal information about users and their preferences whenever they use the Weather and Stock widgets has been definitively disproven - although it was also found out that generic, innocuous information is still sent out nevertheless, particularly application identifiers which tell Apple what apps are being used.
MacNewsWorld reports that some German iPhone users from the docpool.org blog set about trying to find out if this original report was true, and tracked signals coming from about a dozen iPhones. They found out that all the info being sent was an identifier code, or UUID, for which app was being accessed, and not IMEI information or stocks being looked at, and all the signals coming from the phones were identical.
So for the meantime you can rest easy that your weather-watching secrets are safe. (It might not be all good news - knowing that if Apple wanted to, they could is a bit disturbing.)
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I love it when I’m right!