Disruptive Telephony

Where did I travel with my iPhone? Given all the recent kerfuffle over the logging of location data on an iPhone, I naturally had to try it out. First stop was getting the Mac OS X app at:

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

The app itself is super simple... simply launch the app and it goes off and finds your iPhone backups, extracts the location data and shows you a map.

In my case, the Mac I ran the app on only had data from my iPhone 3G and only for the period of time from when I updated it to iOS 4 in July 2010 through when I stopped using it in September 2010 (because I replaced it with an iPhone 4). Still, the data is kind of fun to see. Here's what it looked like overall:

During that time period, I traveled down to Voxeo's corporate office in Orlando, went to a SIPit test event over on the New Hampshire seacoast, and spent a chunk of time in New York City attending SpeechTEK 2010.

Diving into the data a bit more, here's a close-up of the northeast. It's amusing to see the train trip I took down to NYC (for SpeechTEK) as well as the corridor of travel I take from Keene over to Manchester, NH, to fly out of the airport there:

It's curious to see that it shows me wandering around Vermont. We did make a number of day trips around that area and I do carry my iPhone with me (even though I often don't have coverage in some of those areas). No clue what those icons are out on Long Island as I never traveled out there. Obviously the phone must have picked up some signal from towers out there or something like that.

Zooming in on New York is also interesting because you can see, I guess, where AT&T towers must be:

Zooming in on Orlando also shows where I traveled in that region:

Now, it would be great if Apple would get around to telling us WHY they are collecting all this data... but in the meantime it's also quite fascinating to take a look at it and see where my phone thinks I've been. :-)

Another day, I'll have to run this app on my laptop where I sync my iPhone 4. Should have lots more interesting data.

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