iphone 3g not tracking "everywhere" I go.

[artumi-richard]

This is not a bug on the software, but is perhaps important information nonetheless.

Firstly my iPhone 3G doesn't record my location, but that of nearby cellphone base stations. But it does record a number of them, and does enough information to perhaps figure out where I was at a particular time.

Secondly, it does this very rarely.

There are 2420 records in the database of cell phone locations, many at the same time. After analysing the data I find that there are 53 occasions where the iphone has recorded all the data of the cellphone locations near me, over a period from 2010-06-26 13:49:05 to 2011-04-10 16:28:16 a period of 288 days.

That is, it only checks the location of the cell phone base stations once every 5.43 days on average for me. Though at that particular point someone may well be able to determine my location, it is certainly not the treasure trove of information I was expecting to find based on the claims made on the website.

Perhaps this is only true of my iPhone, or only of all the iPhone 3G version.

Something that rare could be linked to my usage of google maps, or other location based services, which would mean it was caused by user interaction, rather than being an always on spy in your pocket...

I should point out that the "data fuzzing" of the application hides the fact there's so little data it's based upon

[nevetS]

(for the developer)

I think you're making an assumption that this is Apple's database. It may not be. I have backups of an original iphone, a 3g, and an iphone 4, and unfortunately, I'm on Windows. So I went through each of the MySQL databases in each phone, and I only have the databases on my iphone 4.

My database has only 67 entries, with three different "TRIP ID's", and nothing in area for WiFi locations. All entries point to the Lat/Long of my home. This leads me to the theory that this is due either to interaction with an App that I've allowed location data for, or it is triggered for a particular feature within the phone that I rarely use. The timestamps aren't epoch time, so I'm unsure of what to make of them - one of my series is: 324762522.619137, which on epoch conversion puts it in 1980. If you could help me figure out the timestamp conversion, I might be able to narrow it down to an app or feature that I was using - since I rarely use apps outside of a few of them.

[artumi-richard]

nevetS: I get your timestamp of 324762522.619137 to be 2011-04-17 20:48:42. The faq says timestamps are measured from 1/1/2001 rather than the usual 1/1/1970.

[artumi-richard]

Further to my first post, of the 53 different timestamps in the table they have a spread over the hours of the day like this:

Hour 08: Count: 5
Hour 09: Count: 1
Hour 10: Count: 5
Hour 11: Count: 6
Hour 12: Count: 7
Hour 13: Count: 5
Hour 14: Count: 6
Hour 15: Count: 3
Hour 16: Count: 6
Hour 17: Count: 4
Hour 18: Count: 1
Hour 19: Count: 2
Hour 21: Count: 1
Hour 23: Count: 1

The hours of the day not included had no entries. For me, the could easily correspond to usage of some location based service on my phone.

[nevetS]

Hmm... the only thing I can think of is that I was trying to upload a video to facebook. I rarely use my phone for facebook now, but there was a time when I was on there all the time, but I really didn't upload much in the way of photos, and never videos (since I just got my iphone4 with video this year). I did try on multiple occasions to get that video uploaded - not sure if it was three times.

I'll test it out today at some point and run a backup and see if my table entries increase.

[beipawel]

Hi,

I too have an iPhone 3G and as I inspected the raw data with an SQLite Manager I too noticed, that the data in it is not as accurate as mentioned on the webpage. I was e.g. in Sweden a while ago, and I do have data pointing to that fact, but all 4 days are saved with the same timestamp.

Sometimes there are location changes on a day by day basis, but then some days are skipped. My 4 Weeks in China are mapped to 3 Timestamps. There are a lot of entries though, which seem to indicate, that the periode there was longer than the 3 timestamps.

I would be interesting whether this is only an iphone 3g phenomenon or if this also happens with iPhone 4.

For the App Hypothesis: I didn't use Facebook in China, as it's not working (tried it once in 4 Weeks). Also I used barely an App but a Chinese-German Dictionary, though I used the ipod App and of course Mail. Also took some pictures, but was generally a lot in Airplane Mode.