hey Android does it too...

Privacy is dead... get over it!

The iPhone uses both, GPS and Skyhook - you can’t hide – the only way to hide from this is to take out the battery – oh, wait a second … you can’t take the battery out of an iPhone!

A lot of people are saying you cannot disable this phone-home behavior. This is not quite correct. In fact when installing iTunes you are asked whether or not you want to send anonymous diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone to Apple. The common annoyed user will click disagree and continue. This is somehow veiled, I grant, but you can turn it off. What you cannot not turn off is the cache on the iPhone being generated (but im almost sure there will be an update very soon), which is in fact a security problem or at least a privacy problem. However according to Apple there is no user identifier send, so all this to a certain level stays anomynous.

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services.

... what Google does

Following the latest days internet outrage to the revelation that the iPhone (iOS) has a cache for it's location service, I decided to have closer look at another front or in particular: what Google does.

In the case of Google, according to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar, an HTC Android phone collected its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least several times an hour. It also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any nearby Wi-Fi networks, as well as a unique phone identifier. [...] Google seems to be taking a different approach, to judge from the data captured by Mr. Kamkar. Its location data appears to be transmitted regardless of whether an app is running, and is tied to the phone’s unique identifier.

So there's a reason Google can shut down its Street View cars and still maintain a quality geolocation service on mobile devices: they are crowdsourcing the location data.

Mobile-phone (mainly Android) and some notenbook users who use Google applications to get a fix on their position or share their location with friends are helping Google build out a database of Wi-Fi hot spots. Try it! Users generally understand when they are sharing their own location with Google or its partners, but they may not realize they are also helping Google match Wi-Fi hot-spot location data with GPS coordinates by transmitting the location of any Wi-Fi access point in wireless range. But thats only a social factor of general human stupidity and of no interest here.

In fact WiFi tracking seems be more accurate than GPS and cell tower positioning. GPS needs a line of sight (problematic indoors) and cell tower positioning is only accurate in a area with many towers and still lacks detail accuracy then.

While it sometimes can be cool or handy to have an application (i.e. route planner tools) know you current location the security aspect of this is devastating, at least for people who still believe there is actual privacy (fyi: no, there isn't): movement profiles, no lying about your location, surveillance. Easy to implement once your device is compromised.

Furthermore hackers can easly weight the potential of their possible targets by looking up mac-adress with the "Android Map" tool by Samy Kamkar (MySpace Samy Worm, "How i met your girlfriend").

Conclusion

I really don't care about privacy whatsoever, but I'm kinda amused by the public outcry that happened when the iPhone revelation happened, but noone seems to care about what Google does or not, since Google is already known as a data collecting monster.

The good thing about Android is that you actually can turn the geolocation service off in your phone:

UPDATE: And now it's becoming a running gag: Windows Phone Collects Location Data, Too | Windows Phone 7 Reviews