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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

The best plausible explanation I've seen for the presence of this data came in the comments section of a Register story.

The commenter says that, in order to calculate your position via cell-mast triangulation, the iPhone has to retrieve the location of the mast from an Apple-hosted database. Instead of repeatedly retrieving the same information, it is cached locally, and that cache is what iPhone Tracker is tapping into.

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There are two (relevant) tables in the SQL Lite database. One is called CellLocation, the other is called WiFi Location.

The data collected includes:

    * Timestamp (in seconds since Jan 2001 GMT)
    * Latitude 
    * Longitude 
    * HorizontalAccuracy 
    * Altitude
    * VerticalAccuracy
    * Speed 
    * Course
    * Confidence

The above are self-explanatory. More opaque (to me, anyway) are the following:

    * PRIMARY
    * MNC
    * LAC
    * CI
    * MCC

If anyone has knowledge of what these mean, please post.

Those are Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code, Cell Identity, and Mobile Country Code.

LAC: Location code CI Cell ID MCC: Mobile Country Code MNC: Mobile Network Code

I cant see primary on my db copy, and my wifi location also contains 33000 MAC addresses.

Indecently, couldn't get the py script up and running on win7, but if you sort by date modified, the size is around 5 meg and you can open the db directly in an sqlite viewer

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