After the discovery of the hidden feature of iPhones and 3G iPads that tracks location of its user. South Korea’s telecoms regulator reacted on it and said that they will conduct an inquiry into Apple to check whether the company has violated the privacy rule of each individual user.
According to the latest study conducted by Security experts Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, they have found out that iPhones and 3G iPads has a hidden encrypted file that store geographical data of its owner in countries such as France and Germany.
South Koreas Communications Commission has already sent a list of questions to Apple to clarify the purpose of the collecting such geographical data. Such questions include why location data was collected from mobile device users and how frequently such data was recorded.
Apple is also required by South Korea to explain why such feature of the gadgets was not encrypted and why they did not inform the users about it, whether they have an option to delete it and whether the data collected where stored in their server.
According to the statement from the British security researchers, they said that the gadgets contained a software iOS4 update which is the operating system of iPhones and iPads where they have contained the position-logging feature.
The iOS 4 has the capability to store the location of the user of gadget including the latitude and longitude coordinates along with a time stamp. Experts suspect that they are doing this through cell-tower triangulation.
They also clarified that such data can be accessed by cellphone companies but said it is not usually stored on a mobile device itself.
According to the report released by the Wall Street Journal, Googles Android smartphones also regularly transmit their locations back to Google.
