I suppose I’m a bit used to this, though.  Google Latitude, an app in my browser and iPhone, has been tracking my location since it was released.  I’ve enabled it and disabled periodically, but it has a rather detailed history of my precise movements since June 2010 (yet another reason I use two-step verification on my Google account).  It’s not public, and I don’t broadcast it.  My immediate family uses it and that’s it – my Mom calls it her Weasley Clock, after the magical device from the Harry Potter series.

It’s the personal uses for data like this that interest me.  I’m the guy that imports his Foursquare check-ins into his Google Calendar (and I’m not alone), geotags his photographs and keeps a detailed calendar that covers over a decade of events.  Aren’t we all moving toward behavior like this?  Our thoughts are increasingly on public display, our Facebook conversations with friends recorded for eternity (it seems) and our seemingly innocuous tweets will be studied by researchers far in the future.  Every time we check-in, comment, update or broadcast, the location of our devices is recorded and sometimes broadcast along with it.  It wouldn’t be hard to take an active social media user’s profiles and pin their locations to a map.

I’m not defending Apple’s collection of this information, though.  And, if it comes out that they were collecting it or transmitting it, they’ll have a rather large problem.  But, for the moment, it’s an interesting look into the data collected by our devices and the trust we place in their makers.  It appears as though the data isn’t even all that precise, having been pulled from cell tower triangulation instead of GPS.  What’s more, it’s a good example of how programmers and geeks are ferreting out the little programming nuances that the rest of us are unable to find ourselves.  It’s like a crowd sourced system of checks and balances!

Here’s a snapshot of the data collected by my iPhone since July 2010, when I installed iOS 4 and, unknowingly, this little iPhone tracker.