Your iPhone probably isn't calling home, just might not want you up in its Core Location

It appears we can all breathe a big sigh of relief when it comes to our iPhone apps. According to John Gruber (Daring Fireball), that suspicious looking URL discovered in firmware 2.x which appeared to be set to deactivate applications may be something slightly more innocuous. According to Gruber -- via "an informed source at Apple" -- the "clbl" in the aforementioned URL stands for "Core Location Blacklist" and is actually used to stipulate that specific pieces of software don't have access to... you guessed it... Core Location. Gruber argues that this makes sense, as the API is covered by fairly strict rules in Apple's SDK. So it looks like (at a glance) this was much ado about nothing -- thanks to a little misinterpretation by Jonathan Zdziarski -- though we are considering getting hot under the collar that Apple reserves the right to deny Core Location access. How dare they?

[Thanks, Paul]

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 8th 2008 11:08AM]

I suspect access to the Core Location is based on the strange system Apple is using for the GPS.

There are 3 ways to locate yourself on iphone OS: cell tower triangulation, wifi, and GPS.

What makes it tricker is the GPS is A-GPS so it MAY be using some information from cell towers (time, location) to help the GPS chip.

The GPS chip is off 90% of the time to save battery life. So MOST of the time, you are using cell tower/wifi information to start off.

But the cell tower information comes from Google -- they bring their own database. And wifi comes from skyhook.

This may be the problem with Nav software as well -- data coming from CoreLocation contains Google information, and you can't filter it out to allow 3rd party nav apps. Yet.

It is a clever hack that saves battery life, but I can see why Google isn't easier to allow TomTom, Garmin, etc to share in that information to build nav apps.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 8th 2008 4:42PM]

this is a severe security hazard
Apple can inspect the software you have, they even can get your privacy
it's stupid to open "back door"

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 9th 2008 8:37AM]

Apple's own CCTV??