My Whereabouts According to iPhone

Two researchers recently unveiled something interesting regarding Apple’s iPhones. It turns out that at around the same time as iOS 4 was released, iPhones started to collect users’ location data. There’s been a lot of talk about what this means to the average user and I definitely recommend reading them.

I couldn’t pass up a chance to see what my own location data looked like and I used the tool developed by the researchers to do so. Below is all my activity on the island of Montréal and vicinity in the past 1 year. One noticeable thing is that it looks like I haven’t ventured east of the island!

Comparing that to my Foursquare checkins over the past year there’s an obvious similarity.

The interesting thing here is that it’s always fun – and sometimes useful – to look back at where you’ve been in the past year; like Gina Trapani mentions here. The only challenge now is to make this data safe, and only accessible to users who opt-in to have their data recorded and not everyone.