iPhone and iPad security: iPhone, iPad can track a user's location history - latimes.com:
"Illustrating the data in dramatic, understandable form, security researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan released a software program Wednesday that allows iPhone and iPad users to download and plot their location histories onto an interactive map, showing their trail over time.

The maps show clusters of colorful dots in hundreds or thousands of precise locations visited by the device's user.

"I have no idea what Apple thinks it's doing in collecting this," said Christopher Soghoian, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Indiana and formerly a Federal Communications Commission employee. "You'd think they would've learned the lesson Google learned, which is: Don't surprise your users on privacy.""

I had assumed this capability was a requirement of The Patriot Act. (And it's not just iPhones, Androids also track user location and upload it for keeping.) Perhaps the beef is that the data is in an unencrypted, easily obtainable format, which probably points to lazy programming and not some nefarious plot. But when are people going to wake up? EVERYTHING you do is being recorded. This is the reality. Bush started it, Obama continued it and now it's institutionalized so it can never be undone.