My Whereabouts According to iPhone

Posted: April 23rd, 2011 | Author: | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

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!
iPhone Tracker Map

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

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.