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Comment by merloen | Hacker News Reader

Well, I think this reaction to the Apple location issue show a lack of perspective. Apple stores the location of nearby cell towers and access points on your phone.

Cell phone providers store your actual location for a period of many months.

This is bad, terrible, uber-creepy: http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protecti...

What Apple is doing now is not even in the same ballpark.

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How is it not in the same ballpark? It's the same data being quietly collected without consent from the same people for various vaguely articulated purposes and being kept for extended periods of time. How is this different? It's the same game, only the team colours have changed. In fact, it's plausible that the cell phone companies have a more legitimate interest in tracking location since understanding where devices are used is fundamental to their business of providing cell phone service. Furthermore, there are other implications to having location data cached on the phone since the border guards in a number of countries including the US are authorized to snoop on any devices they find. The phone company data would (at least theoretically) require some kind of court order.

So seriously? you think that the risk I might go through a border crossing and have data that I know is there taken without warrant is the same as cell phone companies holding the same data (it's just the other end of the connection) and being able to sell it, provide access to it, whatever without any oversight on my part at all?

I can wipe my phone data, I know if someone has gotten a warrant to see it.

and lets face it if you use a phone and a credit card your broad movements (which is all you can tell from this data) can be worked out anyway. If you don't want someone to know your location then this is small potatoes in the ways you are going to need to change your behaviour

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