Apple issues Q&A on "Locationgate", and addresses key issues

Apple rather belatedly issued a Q&A on the whole "LocationGate" saga. This confirms what I said about the data being a cache of cell tower and wifi locations. The fact that this was kept for up to a year was a bug. Within the next few weeks they will reduce this to 7 days, they will not back up the cache any longer, and they will turn off the cache when you turn location services off, which addresses the issue reported by the Wall Street Journal and widely re-reported.. These are all good actions to take, and address the key issues in my opinion. It does reinforce the importance of developers being careful about location security, and Apple was slack in this case, even though the potential risks were much less dire than widely reported.

Note that in the short term if you are concerned, you can encrypt your iPhone database backup just by checking a box on the front page in iTunes (after plugging in your iPhone). If you do this, the current location log cannot be accessed by someone who hacks into your computer.

My presentation on "Future Location and Social Networking" at GeoWeb

I gave my presentation at the GeoWeb conference yesterday and it generated a good bit of interest. I recorded it with the brilliant ScreenFlow software which I have been using extensively to do screen capture videos, but this is the first time I tried it with a conference presentation and it worked very well. I talked previously about what I was planning to talk about - in summary, it's about the ideas we have about modeling future location for whereyougonnabe, and I talk quite a bit about the bigger picture of where we plan to take it - combining space, time and the social graph to create a new infrastructure for calendaring and scheduling. 

GeoWeb presentation: The Power of Future Location for Social Networking from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

It's about 30 minutes long but I encourage you to take the time to check it out, I really think that the whole future location area is a very interesting one!