iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type

Mave

Mave

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Cops love finding iPhones at crime scenes because the phones carry so much priceless data about your usage habits, or as the cops call it, evidence. That email you typed months back about feeling stabby when you drink? It's still there because there because the iPhone captures everything you type to help fuel its spellcheck abilities—even emails you thought you deleted. And that's not all.

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  • Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.
  • iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.
  • Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said some of it could be useful to police.
  • Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another. "Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory," [said John B. Minor, a member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners].

Source: http://consumerist.com/2010/08/iphones-help-cops-solve-crimes-by-capturing-everything-you-type-do.html
 
Nimphioüs said:
Mave said:
So don't be bad when you have an iPhone :3
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Regardless, you shouldn't be spyed on.
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I don't think you are when you're not under investigation.
The images are still stored on your iPhone, not stored on a remote server.



Seems like the creator of the article maybe went a bit too far.

While a lot of this is true, the article implies that this occurs to a much greater degree than I believe it does. For example, apps do take a screenshot of what they are displaying at the time they are closed. This is to make them appear to start up faster the next time you open them. But they don't save more than one of these, so it's not as if they're constantly tracking you. It could theoretically be useful if someone was doing something suspicious the last time they used an app, but that's it. Similarly, the inclusion of GPS info on photos is is pretty useful feature, even if it could theoretically be used by the police. It's not some sinister plot to track you. And I have a very hard time believing that the phone permanently captures everything you type, as is implied here. I imagine that you could only get usable information from this in relatively limited circumstances.

It's worth knowing about some of these things, and it's possible that there are security issues that need examining, but why is it that every Consumerist article about the iPhone seems to be pushing some sort of "Apple is Big Brother" angle?
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This topic was a lot worse... in fact, the things listed here are hardly useful at all.

Mave said:
Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.
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In such a case, the suspect would have had to used the Maps application before being arrested.
For an actual location, the suspect would have had to activate the location feature, and even then, the location given can be within a 2 kilometre radius.

Mave said:
iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.
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Might is the key word here. That data can also be easily removed from uploaded photos, and even spoofed.

Mave said:
Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said some of it could be useful to police.
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Those are individual applications, most of which have some option to delete browsing history. Although, not only is this data 95% useless, for third-party applications it may be a lot more difficult to retrieve the desired information.

Mave said:
Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another. "Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory," [said John B. Minor, a member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners].
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It stores one image (the latest) for some applications included with iOS. Third-party apps don't (and can't) have this feature, and it's not even included on all default apps.
Once again, this is only useful when the suspect was doing something incriminating within an application before being arrested.

Overall, this whole thing is pretty stupid. Like I said, Apple's new patent is a lot more invasive, but potentially useful, (to police) whereas most of the information listed in this article is bullshit.
 
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