iPhone phone-home furphy

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 November 2007 01:40

Mobility

Claims by the tinfoil hat brigade that Apple was tracking user activity on individual iPhones have been shown to be unfounded.

The fuss started when someone discovered that the URL sent by an iPhone's Stocks and Weather widgets includes a parameter named IMEI.

An IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) is the number that uniquely identifies a mobile phone.

If you put two and two together and end up with a number significantly greater than four, you may also leap to the conclusion that Stocks and Weather requests actually transmit the iPhone's IMEI.

When other people analysed the URLs actually transmitted by the widgets, they discovered that it was the identity of the widget, not the iPhone, that was being sent. The value of the IMEI parameter doesn't change when you use a different iPhone - or iPod touch, for that matter. Since the iPod touch isn't a phone, it doesn't have an IMEI to start with.

But the discovery does lead to questions about why someone at Apple thought it was a good idea to have a parameter called IMEI rather than some other name. Was - or more worryingly is - there a plan to send uniquely identifying information at some stage?

Where's that roll of aluminium foil?