The iPhone tracking fiasco and what you can do about it
Source: Engadget
By now you’ve no doubt heard about a certain iOS database file called consolidated.db. It made quite a splash yesterday when a pair of researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, from O’Reilly Media announced the “iPhone tracking software” the duo had “discovered hidden on the phones.” Here’s the problem: they didn’t discover it, at least not originally. The file, known to hold large amounts of geolocation data collected from WiFi access points and cell-towers, has been probed by forensic experts ever since the retail launch of the iPhone 4 back in June of 2010. Hell, Sean Morrissey and Alex Levinson published a physical book on the topic back in December 2010, entire excerpts of which can easily be found on Google. So either the team from O’Reilly is being disingenuous with its claims or it’s being lazy.
Regardless, the story laid dormant for months until the O’Reilly team was able to visualize the data in a very personal way. Running the team’s open-source iPhoneTracker software to see the detailed locations of our worldly travels is absolutely fascinating. Imagining the same data file in the hands of a stalker, misguided detective, or a jealous lover is downright creepy.
But how is it possible that an issue like this has avoided the tech community at large for more than a year? And more importantly, what can you do about it? Read on to find out.
Update: A timely discovery from Vishal – here’s a note from Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell [PDF] to Congressmen Edward Markey and Joe Barton, providing a detailed look at its privacy policy, presumably regarding this issue.
Sure the visualization is powerful, but so is the emotive energy that surrounds any issue related to Apple. Toss in big brother privacy concerns and you’ve just unleashed the perfect storm into the blogosphere echo chamber. Yet, we heard nary a peep emitted outside of forensic circles until yesterday. Ryan Block, lover of fine coffee and Engadget Editor Emeritus, postulated an answer to our question over at GDGT, theorizing that perhaps the forensic community, unlike the security world, is so insular that it lacks the incentive to go public with such privacy concerns. After all, criminals will change their behavior if they know what you’re tracking. But who’s the so-called “criminal” in this case?
For that, we have to dig into Apple’s privacy policy, something you accept every time you blindly click away Apple’s terms and conditions. The policy was last updated on the 21st of June, 2010 — the same day that Apple released iOS 4. Guess what? It talks a lot about collecting and using non-personal information, including location data. Here are a few choice paragraphs:
We also collect non-personal information − data in a form that does not permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose.
Apple then cites several examples:
We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.
The company later expounds on location services specifically:
To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.
Problem is, the location data is very personal and hardly anonymous because it’s stored right on yourphone — the most personal device we own. The consolidated.db is also replicated (unencrypted by default) to any PC or Mac your iPhone syncs with, and subsequently any additional backup devices you might use (Windows Home Sever, Time Capsule, etc.).
But what’s actually being captured here? Is it really the precise location of the device, i.e., you? No, actually, it’s not. According to “iOS Forensic Analysis for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch,” written by Sean Morrissey and Alex Levinson, the data collected is the geolocation of the cell towers that the iOS device communicates with. So it’s an approximation of your location. However, the researchers go on to say that, “This data, along with corresponding data from carriers, can link a phone to a specific location on a given date and time.” Levinson concludes, however, that the data is never transmitted to Apple, and is used exclusively by built-in iOS apps like Maps and Camera.
Apple’s not alone in this behavior, either. Just last month, The New York Times ran a story titled, “It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know.” In this case, however, “it” does not refer to Apple, it references the cellphone companies who have to track your location in order to provide the best possible service. That meant 35,000 longitude and latitude coordinates collected over a six month period for one very unhappy Deutsche Telekom subscriber who had to go to court in Germany to find out what his provider knew. See, like the United States, German carriers are not required to report the data they collect.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not letting Apple off the hook here — we also want to know why the company needs to collect and maintain so much of our location data for such a long time. And why is it so easily accessible? But we, as consumers, have to pay better attention if we want to reserve the right to scream foul.
If this issue really concerns you, then there are a few things you can do right now to take control of your privacy. First, you can go into iTunes and start encrypting your iPhone and iPad backups. Second, you can purge the consolidated.db files sitting on your various hard disk drives. Lastly, if your device is jailbroken, you can install the free Untrackerd app to continuously clean the consolidated.db file. That should keep you busy while we wait for Apple to respond.
Source: Engadget
Marketers Will See An Increase in Social Media Spending This Year (Study)
According to a poll from Effie Worldwide and Mashable, a overwhelming number of marketers consider social media to be an integral part of their marketing strategy this year. Over 70% plan to increase their social media budget by more then 10% as results are showing favorable returns.
The poll was given to a group of ad agency executives and marketers from firms such as Bank of America, Colgate-Palmolive and Mini USA, among others in February, also found that the primary social media goal is to increase Facebook “Likes”. It has become a household term that the social media giant has managed to sneak into just about everything.
Speaking on behalf of themselves and their clients, group members reported that social networking would take 11.9% of their overall budget this year compared with 13% for TV. That figure should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since $68.7 billion was spent on all TV advertising last year, compared to just $26 billion for Internet advertising, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.
Much of that spending will go toward trying to find new Facebook fans, which 35% of respondents said is their main goal in 2011. “Increase our presence on mobile” was number two on that list, coming in at 22%.
Other findings
- Brands that were cited for “effectively getting their message across via social media” include Old Spice(chosen by 15%), Pepsi (8%), Starbucks (7%) and Ford (6%).
- 50% of respondents said they use a mix of in-house and agency to handle social media outreach.
- 80% said they were planning iPad-based advertising and/or an iPad-based app this year, while 20% said they were “not planning much” of either.
- 87% said social media was “important” or “very important” to achieving their biggest marketing goal this year.
Source: Mashable
Download Squad and Switched being shut down
Part of my daily routine is to visit the AOL Tech blogs. So you would imagine the huge surprise I got when I check yesterday to find a post titled “Farewell, Internet”. Download Squad and Switched have always been favorites of mine and have an awesome layout thats easy to read.
Initially I thought it was something to do with the upcoming shortage of IP addresses but as I read further it seems the two sites are no longer getting the traffic they need to pay the bills. They were great sites for finding interesting information that maybe wasn’t so main stream. Oh well, it was great while it lasted.
“Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act” or simply S.3386
President Obama just signed into law a new bill that could change the way internet marketing is run. Depending on how it is enforced, many marketers online today are considered criminals. Theoretically this bill was put into place to protect the consumer from Acai Weight Loss and Make Money Online re-bill sites. These types of site have gotten a lot of press because it was hard for any of them to be prosecuted. Check out these hi-lights though, it appears that many honest, well honester, marketers have gotten trapped too.
- The bill expressly prohibits data transfer of any consumer financial information for the purpose of billing a 3rd party transaction. For post-transaction upsells, billing information has to be re-collected. Ouch.
- The bill requires material terms of all negative option offers to be disclosed prior to the collection of consumer billing information.
- The bill includes references to credit, debit, AND bank account information (meaning that the ACH and check 21 billers in the industry are no longer off the hook.)
Many online sites run on a business strategy of upsells. Their initial product might just break even or even lose them money, but the upsells are where the real money is. The majority of products on Clickbank run by this strategy. It’s unknown how the FTC will enforce this bill, especially with marketers located outside the US but we can expect to see some changes in the future.
Online Music Streaming
There are a lot of great music streaming sites out there. A few years ago I was a huge fan of Pandora but unfortunately it isn’t available in Canada anymore. Don’t worry though, I’ve put together a list of some great alternatives for you fellow Canadians.
I am listing Grooveshark first because it’s my personal favorite. Just type in a song and add it to your playlist, its that easy. It’s a great looking site enhanced with the latest HTML5 and I haven’t yet searched for a song that they didn’t have.
Stereomood provides a great alternative when you don’t know what you want to listen to. All you do is pick a ‘mood’ and Stereomood will create a playlist. It actually works great and I highly recommend it for those long working days.
Jamendo allows you to listen for free and download it directly from their site. Jamendo users can discover and share albums, create playlists and share music with friends. Users can also review albums or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support them by making a donation.
Open a Web browser, type a song name, and have that song start playing immediately.
Spotify offers you legal and free access to a huge library of music. All you need to do is create an account and download their streaming music player.
Not a great looking site but allows you to download popular songs from various artists.
lala.com
Find music and listen – Lala enables you to listen to full-length songs, not just clips. Search or browse by your favorite genre. Lala has over 5 million licensed songs, so it’s most likely that you’ll find something you’ll like.
Jogli is the search engine for music. It scans the internet for existing music and music video clips, and then indexes the music to allow an easy and efficient search. As a result, users have access to huge, free inventory of music. Including half a billion songs and more then 12 million albums. Also now can send any playlist, albums or artist page to your Facebook friends by clicking share. You can also create online bookmarks using del.icio.us and other online bookmarking services.
Jango is all about making online music fun, social and simple. A free custom radio service that learns from your taste and connects you to others who like what you like. Just type in what you want to hear – and Jango will play your chosen music and other favorites of Jango users who share your taste. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs
vSide is an impressive, interconnected virtual city environment where you can hang out, listen to music, chat, dance, and make friends. The 3D virtual club features everything from DJs to bands to celebrity appearances. Come in and meet bands like Maroon 5 and All-American Reject, gain exposure to up-and-coming artists like Kevin Michael or just hang with your friends. vSide is your non-stop entertainment destination 24/7.
SkreemR is a search engine for locating audio files on the web. SkreemR crawls the internet for audio tracks and then provides the information for you to listen, download, or find out more about music that you are interested in.
A great new online music player called Spool.fm, allows you to search for all your favorite music and easily to make playlists. You’ll be able to hear those playlists over and over on the Web. Spool.fm includes drag & drop to create playlists, AJAX everywhere and a lot of great features such as similar artists recommendations and the awesome feature “listen with a friend” which allows you to listen in real time to what a friend is listening to.
If you consider yourself a music artist and would like to expose your creation to the world, you should try iJigg. You’ll be able to easily upload your music files and share it with others on the site itself or via emails, blog/site embedding and even post it to your facebook account. This great site is not just for artists, It’s for everyone who likes to listen to music and discover new songs.
Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler system, a music engine based on a massive collection of Music Profiles. Each music profile belongs to one person, and describes their taste in music. Last.fm uses these music profiles to make personalized recommendations, match you up with people who like similar music, and generate custom radio stations for each person.
imeem is a great new social media network that will allow you to browse for tags in a different and cool way and will give you lots of stuff to enjoy. You can search and listen to music, watch videos, find playlists, upload photos and share just about everything with your friends online.
While this is not an options for people in Canada, I thought I’d put it on here just in case they decide to change their minds.
Multiply gives you an easy way to share all kinds of digital media, including photos, blogs, videos, music and more, all in one convenient place: your own personal web site. With Multiply, you can share and discuss your topics with everyone in your “social network,” and also be alerted whenever they have something new.
Creating a Great Facebook Ad
When Facebook first introduced their advertising program, marketers all over the Internet were ecstatic. Facebook introduced targeting on such a large scale that no one had seen before. Advertisers were able to target where people lived, their age, sex, relationship status, interests, and place of work. These were great tools and Facebook already had a huge population at that time to take advantage of.
In order for Facebook to be successful for your business, you need to know how to construct an attractive ad that produces the right kind of traffic for your specific site. A great place to start is to read the Facebook Advertising Guidelines. You’ll never get an ad created if you don’t follow these rules. Each ad that is created is carefully analyzed by a Facebook employee before it is allowed to be shown to the masses. Your style or category of site might not even be allowed on Facebook at all, so reading this might save you a lot of time.
Creating an successful ad may seem like a tough thing to do, but just think of it this way. Create an ad that you would like to click. Make it interesting and true to the content of the page it sends people. If the ad is misleading you will just be wasting your money on useless traffic. Study your target market, find their interests and view it from their eyes. Hard work while creating the ad will almost always pay off in the end.
Setting Up the Ad Campaign
Facebook has great tool available that allows their service to meat your budget, whatever it is. I recommend taking it slow at first to see what works best for you. Here is an example of an ad on Facebook and it’s specific targeting. It was created to advertise a skateboarding eBook.
As you can see, each ad consists of a title, image and a short description. There is no limited to the number of ads you can run under one campaign so it’s best to create many. Make each one just a little different, maybe a different title or image. The trick is to see which one has the highest clicks or CTR (click through rate). The more effective the ad, the higher the CTR will be. Here is an example of the above campaigns statistics after being run for a few days.
Campaign Stats
3,746 clicks
1,505,202 impressions
0.249% CTR
.08 average click
$301.14 spent
This particular ad managed to attract 3,746 clicks at an average cost of $0.08 per click. The ad was displayed 1,505,202 times which means the CTR was 0.249%. Facebook ads tend to have a lower CTR then other PPC (pay per click) services but you tend to get a higher quality of traffic. In this case, the advertiser spent just over $300 and in turn, 3,746 people visited their site.
To determine if the ad is profitable we have to look at the goal of the ad. Your goal might simply be to raise awareness of your site or maybe you have a service you would like to sell. This ad was promoting an eBook on skateboarding and below is the sales resulting from this ad.
Total Revenue: 330.27
From the revenue received, this ad produced a profit of around $30. This might not seem like much but each campaign can be scaled up or down for more of less clicks. For every dollar that was spent on this ad, an average of 110% came back as profit. If they were to spend $1000 you could expect somewhere around $100 in profit.
If you apply this logic to another type of business, say web design like ours. Each of those customers may have cost us 90% of the money we made, but their business is bound to provide us with more from referrals and visitors of their sites. Viewing a visitor as just a sales number is not always the full story.
Once you have a profitable ad, analyse it and figure out what makes it work. Tweak it more and more to see how big of profit margin you can achieve.
For a great resource on Facebook Ads and news, check out 4 Hour Affiliate.
AutoCreditCanada
Our newest creation comes as a custom WordPress theme design for Auto Credit Canada. Opening in 1996 they specialize in auto financing and sales and are known for their excellent service.
We wanted to give them a unique and no-fuss look that got straight to the point. This site is easy to navigate, has an appealing design and provides a one stop solution for finance applications and their current inventory of automobiles. It incorporates an application that allows users to impute their information and it is immediately sent to an Auto Credit Canada representative.
Being based on the WordPress CMS, Auto Credit Canada will be able to update it quickly and easily by designing new pages in WordPress’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The new pages will be automatically incorporated into their existing site.
WordPress offers a great solution to your web needs and is very customizable to any solution you might need. Best of all it is open-source which is free to use. For a full list of features WordPress can offer, click here. If you would like to hear more about how Enioa can design your site around WordPress, feel free to contact us.
10 Great Icon Libraries
Sometimes you don’t have enough time in a project to customize everything. Having a few libraries handy can help you complete projects in time and on budget.
Here is a great list of icon libraries that might come in handy. Check out our post on social network icons too.
Iconshock
Massive library of 970667 stock icons in 259 icon sets and and it’s updated weekly. Various sizes from 16 to 512 px available in different styles and sorted into industries.
Icondock
108 icons in sizes of 48px, 64px, 128 px for Adobe programs. Very crisp and clear icons that have a great web 2.0 feel to them.
Iconexperience
Displaying more than 2400+ professionally designed icons with sizes ranging from 16 X 6 to 256 X 256 px with high level of detail even in small sizes.
Iconbuffet
The site was down at the time of posting this but I have used them before. They have a great selection of free icons for web developers. Definitely check them out.
If you guys know of other great sites, leave them in the comments below.
Social Network Icons
The web today is all connected and your web page needs to follow this trend if you want it to get noticed. Social Network integration is a great way for people to share your site with their friends and is also a great way to get your content noticed. Linking to these social network pages is usually done with specific icons you see all over the Internet. Here are a few unique ones we have found around.
PhaseFatBurner.com
We just finished our newest design for Phase Fat Burner. They were looking for a clean and attractive design to showcase their product. Basic information for the product had to be laid out in an easy to read design that quickly and effectively gets the details across.
If you or your company are looking for a new design, or you are just getting onto the internet for the first time, check us out at enioa.com.