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Comment by madair | Hacker News Reader

once a person connects to another person on FaceTime it for some reason non of us in the office can figure out, sends us APPLE a message and says those two people are connecting via Facetime and gives out their location to us. So for whatever reason we need that information just blows my mind. As a consumer why would you need to let Apple know that you are connecting with a person via FaceTime, its non of Apple’s business.

That seems pretty bad.

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> That seems pretty bad.

It's required so you can map phone numbers to the other person's IP address. I assume it's also used for STUN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN).

(This is just me guessing, of course, but the "don't automatically assume a huge conspiracy theory" method almost always ends up with me being right, so there.)

I wasn't thinking so much conspiracy theory...just marketing overreach, I didn't think there's possibly a technical explanation that holds water, interesting.

Incrementally connecting to random IPV4 addresses has been shown to be a really awkward way of setting up a peer to peer connection. When you try it with IPV6 people have the tendency to get born, live 70 or 80 years, and die before their FaceTime call gets connected.

Why? Every time I log into AIM I tell AOL where I am too.

Yeah, and a phone call is analogous. I'd retract my comment, but it's too late.

Location information could be used to connect people to a server that gives them a better connection. Not necessarily an evil thing.

That information can be had passively via a GeoIP-like service, though, since it's only usable on a wifi (and thus, tethered to some hard line) connection. Sending GPS coordinates seems rather unnecessary.

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