my name is mwd

An update to my last blog post – it seems that the app for displaying where your iPhone has been actually makes your details less accurate – thanks to ScaredyCat for the tip off there!

So here’s where my iPhone has been if I use the accurate data, not the obfuscated data:

You can see it no longer implies that I’ve not been in London as much as the map in the previous post, but still implies I spend a lot more of my life on the M6 Toll road than I actually do!

It’s still a fairly inaccurate map when you get down to the data. Here’s a snapshot of the train corridor again:

It’s not quite the same area as in the last post – the visualisation app becomes very unusable when you have a huge number of extra points on it when you do this, so trying to zoom in and move around was a nightmare. But you can see it still looks like I went on tour of the local villages rather than just sat on the train.

To me, this is even better – all the apps I want to write with the data are much more practical now that I have higher accuracy data, and it’s still not enough to put me in a building.

I appreciate some people are a little upset about this data, and the fact it’s not locked some how. I suspect again geeks are not normal people and are sufficiently paranoid that this isn’t a shock to us. Perhaps this will be a handy wake up call for others; I’d argue that this is an example of why you need to be generally paranoid about who has access to your computer, rather than that this data exists is the problem in the first place. If people can get this data off your computer it’s a symptom of a bigger issue you have.