SCOTUS hearing a case on limiting data mining

I thought this oddly congruent with the current stink over iPhone/Android location data collection.

The story, interestingly enough, isn't about computers: it's about pharmacy records. In Vermont, patient pharmacy records are, of course, confidential. Doctor's pharmacy prescription orders are not. So pharmacies have been selling the data to aggregators who sell it back to drug reps and companies, who can then target doctors who prescribe lots of generics, stuff like that.

The patient side of the data is anonymized, but apparently you can still track patient drug use, you just can't tie it to a patient.

The Vermont doctor's did not like this, so they got a law passed banning said aggregation. The aggregators appealed and got it overturned, Vermont appealed it to the Supreme Court.

The issue being debated is actually free speech, and it has a couple of interesting twists that I can't really do justice to relating it here, so read the fine article if you're interested.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/26/135703500/supreme-court-weighs-whether-to-limit-data-mining

Apple promises patch for iOS tracking, posts a Q&A

The patch will encrypt the location database and force it to recycle. Also, if you turn off the location tracking option, it will not store location information in the table.

In the Wired article, Apple says: "Apple calls this “crowdsourcing” location data, because millions of iPhones are collecting this data and transmitting it to Apple to build its comprehensive location database to assist with location services.

“Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes,” Apple said. “iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements).”"

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/iphone-location-bug/


In the Q&A, "4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below). "

Further, Apple claims "The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data."

And finally, the fix: "Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

* reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
* ceases backing up this cache, and
* deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone."

Apple Q&A: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html


http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/04/27/1326252/Apple-Updating-iOS-To-Address-Privacy-Concerns