With all of the recent excitement in the security world about people’s concerns regarding smart phones that know your location, a bigger problem has been overlooked. Most Macintosh users probably don’t realize that there is a feature called “location services” in OS X 10.5 and later. This feature is not widely publicized but I assure you that it’s there. This feature queries a database and determines your location based on which wifi access points can be seen by your computer every 12 hours or when invoked manually via a web browser or other application. I’m not sure how well this works in the more rural areas but I live in a suburban area and location services pinned my down within 100 feet or so. Apple’s statement on the matter follows:
“The data collected to provide your location does not identify you personally. If you do not want such data collected, you can choose to disable the feature, which does not negatively affect your Mac in any way.”
If you would like to test your own computer just go to Google Maps. See that tiny button under the 4-way arrow in the upper left corner? Push it. I tested this under Firefox and Safari. Thankfully they both had the courtesy to ask me if I would like to allow the web page to query my location. The thing that struck me odd is that Apple seems to have left it up to the application to ask you if you would like to allow use of the feature. Potentially a malicious application could use this in the background without your knowledge.
To my knowledge, any Macintosh with a airport card using OS X 10.5, OS X 10.6 or any Windows box with Safari has location services enabled by default. Here is how to disable location services. I’m curious why Apple thought that this should be a default setting in your operating system. Thanks Apple, but no thanks. My computer on my static IP is querying the mother ship every 12 hours to figure out where I’m sitting with my computer. For some reason, I just don’t like that.
