Can you imagine that with a few lines of code you can leave the largest online community hanging? Well, we climbed the bet, because six years later, our protagonist today forced Apple to rethink all its privacy policy. That is exactly what Samy Kamkar achieved. With just 19 years, Myspace paralyzed in 2005 and, in 2011, He showed that our iPhone tracks us more than we thought.
The day Myspace was on the edge of chaos
January 2005. A young man passionate about the code decides JavaScript whose sole purpose was to accumulate friends automatically. No one imagined that, in less than a day, that innocent experiment would infect one million accounts and force Myspace to disconnect servers to cut the propagation.
This came to such an extent that the United States authorities assaulted their room, computers, recorders requisitioned and even his DVDs. The verdict was final: three years without the Internet, $ 20,000 of fine and hundreds of hours of community work. For many, that would have been the end of a dream. For Samy, he simply encouraged him to move on.
But let’s know Samy Kamkar something better. He was born on December 10, 1985 in the United States. From a young age he was interested in computer science and security. He learned to schedule in a self -taught way at age 16 co -founded Fonality. A VOIP communications company based in Santa Barbara (California). Over there He studied for a while at the University of Californiaalthough his real passion was “trying doors” in systems and networks.
With 19 years he jumped to fame with the “Samy Worm” of MySpace. That incident marked the beginning of a career as an independent researcher. Today he lives in southern California, collaborates with publications such as Wired and The Wall Street Journal and travels security conferences showing vulnerabilities in drones, browsers and … our own mobile.
The great discovery about the privacy of the iPhone
In 2011, Samy Kamkar decided Test something everyday as off maps and keep walking. With a simple script on Android, he saw that Google received data from towers, Wi-Fi networks and GPS coordinates every few seconds. But his experiment was not there: while Samy compared results, two independent researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, uncovered the other face of the coin animated by Samy having “thrown out of the blanket.”
Allan and Warden discovered that the iPhone kept, in a non -encrypted file called consolidated.db, your entire locations history for months. By synchronizing the mobile with iTunes, Anyone could extract that file And, with free tools like iPhone Tracker, draw every step you took.
The bomb exploded when Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Steve Jobs on April 21, 2011, asking him if Apple was turning the iPhone into a “Itchrack.” Jobs acknowledged that iOS collected intermittent dataE to improve emergency maps and services. But he avoided specifying how often or how long they were stored. The press, users and even the BBC morning echoed the controversy. To stop the crisis, Apple began to patch iOS:
- iOS 4.3.3 (March 2011) introduced the option in Settings> Privacy> Location to delete the locations history saved on the device.
- iOS 5 expanded the functionality of ICloud, but did not encryp consolidated.db, until in iOS 8 (2014) the file system was migrated to APFs with inactive data encryption by default.
- iOS 14.5 (April 2021) premiered App Tracking Transparency: Any app must ask for explicit permission to track between apps and websites.
- In the App Store, the Nutrition Labels deprivation emerged: files where each developer details what data collects and with what purpose.
Today, your iPhone continues to record diagnostic, health and location information, but with much clearer controls. If you want to check it yourself, go to Settings> Privacy and Safety> Location and Low up to System Services. There you will find “important places.”
On my iPhone, for example, IOS has marked 189 locations in the last month. Thanks to that 2011 discovery, You can visualize it, delete it or deactivate it with a single touch. So the next time an app requests location permits, we can remember to remember that 19 -year -old student who lifted the carpet.
In applesfera | Look for my iPhone, what it is, how to activate it and how to use it even without connection
In applesfera | How to change my Apple ID: Step by step guide to change mail, data and password
Related news :