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.


iPhone 2.2 Jailbroken

Posted: December 2nd, 2008 | Author: | Tags: , | No Comments »

This weekend I finally manage to jailbreak my iphone. The process is pretty painless, and is well documented on various sites; here, and here, for example.

The best part of doing this is that I can now unlock features of the iphone that would normally be closed to me. I can now record video with the phone, tether the phone to a laptop, and most importantly and ridiculously I can use the native terminal on the system. And a very cool side-effect is that I can now ssh to a remote host from my cell phone!

cydia - alternate app store cydia - 2 terminal

Dec 16, 2008 Update:I added a nicer screenshot of the terminal app to the above shots.