Your Phone Tells About You
With the right equipment as well as direct access to your phone, anyone can tap the private details of your life: SMS, photos, tweets, facebook, your appointments, your favorite sports venues, or even what you ate last night.
"You can know everything about a person by cell phone," said Amber Schroader, owner of Paraben of Pleasant Grove, Utah, which makes forensic software for investigators and the general public. "You can see their YouTube videos, the websites they explore, their pictures. People are addicted to their mobile phones, so this is the latest and most valuable information available about someone."
Although wireless companies and others have long been able to track the location phone from afar, is still not clear other information that can be accessed remotely. But the forensic investigators have long known that the biographical data storage can be collected when they have direct access to handheld devices. Even before the discovery of the location tracking records shown by researchers this week have been found on the iPhone, investigators have collected data from the Apple smartphones.
"We analyzed the iPhone since its launch," said Christopher Vance, a digital forensics specialist at Marshall University's Forensics Science Center, which works with law enforcement agencies, both private and public in West Virginia.
Vance and his laboratory helped retrieve data from the iPhone including the call records, map search results from the Google Maps app, graphics stored in the browser cache, even the record of what has been typed into the iPhone's virtual keyboard.
"There are a lot of important information on the iPhone," he said.
Not everyone is happy to be how easily a phone reveal their secrets. Apple has continuously ignored requests for comment will be archived tracking, even when members of Congress began to ask the question why Apple users track their phone and what apple on such information. Besides the privacy advocates warn that retrieves data from the person's phone without their permission is a step down again in the way that has been problematic.
"It's not a cell phone - this is the telephone tapping," said John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project. "The consumer should have the right to control whether their data is collected and how it is used.
"People do not realize about the gold mine of data about their life that is in their mobile phone," he added. "There should be a learning process so that people will begin to understand it."
The privacy advocates said that the disclosure of the iPhone tracking records underscores the need for law and new legislation to determine the type and amount of information that can be collected mobile equipment. In addition to the iPhone tracking records, have been opened that Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones regularly send the location data to the two companies.
"I see a slippery slope," said Sharon Goott Nissim, representatives of consumer privacy at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a consumer advocacy group. "When the data collection has been done, even harder to stop law enforcement officials to gain access to it. The way to stop this is to stop the collection first."
From experience over the years, now investigators have had a better idea than the owner of the phone on what data they can legally get from mobile consumers. Archive iPhone location tracking "has been flying under the radar for a while," said Sean Morrissey, CEO of Katana Forensics. "For the forensic investigators, it is a good thing. You do not want to tell the bad guy that you can get the information from the phone.
"We know most of the data will be contained in mobile equipment," he said.
The forensic investigators have long been able to take the list of connections, recording calls and short messages from mobile phones. But smartphones such as the iPhone has significantly increased the amount of data. The part relating to the growing consumer use of the equipment as it is and the more applications available for the equipment.
Schroader, whose firm was offering forensic data retrieval tool worth $ 199 called iRecovery, said although investigators have been able to explore the innards of the phone over the years, the capacity growth of smartphones means a major change in the amount of personal data is now readily available.
"We have made these tools that support iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Android for years, but it's his storage that changes everything," he said. "Your old phone has only a few MB of storage. Now we are at the GB level, and will ultimately be at Terabyte. Moreover, if we work closely with law enforcement, which translates into more evidence, which makes us all very happy."
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