Find Stored iPhone Location Data on your Computer
Found on Wired on Thursday, 21 April 2011
The iOS 4 operating system allows your iPhone to store location data constantly without you activating the feature. The unencrypted file where the data is stored, labeled "consolidated.db," was discovered and brought to light by software hackers Peter Warden and Alasdair Allen. The data is stored on your computer when you sync it with your iPhone.
"To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you'll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately."
It's more interesting why Apple made the iPhone monitor and log every movement of its owner without asking first. That's a serious privacy problem.