AT&T cellular IP reveals iPhone users' location?

you don't always get a NAT IP -- it seems to be a locality thing, depending on how and where they are bridging from the telephone network to the internet -- I've always seen a public IP in San Jose.

I was under the impression it showed your gateway location as well. I started looking into it at one point and at least a simple whois lookup on the IP didn't reveal much information.

Granted, it's easy enough to lookup wifi AP's, but one has to wonder how well this works. ... And if they've had a security evaluation done. ;)

In the old times of WAP, mobile operators had gateways, so even though you could get the IP address of the phone (from a server-side for example) the information was meaningless to locate the user. With AT&T 3G I honestly do not know. May be someone could do some basic hacking and post some results.

I wonder if the app is asking for permission to do it. If not, in my neighbourhood we call it "spyware". Seriously, it is a clever idea but I hope they are doing the right thing and asking the user for approval.