"As I sit here applying a new layer of Reynolds tin foil to my international hat of conspiracy, its been proven that Apple tracks iPhone usage and tracks IEMI numbers of all their iPhones worldwide. Hidden in the code of the Stocks and Weather widgets is a string that sends the IMEI of your phone to a specialized URL that Apple collects," says the Uneasy Silence blog.
Obviously "Weather" is kinda benign, but Apple knowing your Stock habits, isn't that a little personal? What's next, they read your email too? Now who thinks I'm crazy?
The IMEI is the International Mobile Equipment Identity, a 15-digit code that identifies the phone to the network. Seems to me that if a phone is accessing a service, you might well expect it to send the IMEI as a matter of course. Could an expert on GSM please confirm whether other phones (eg Nokia, Windows Mobile etc) do exactly the same thing?
9to5Mac tackles the same topic, adding that "it looks like some Leopard applications behave in this mannor", with a quote from a Digg user:
For those of you who don't know what Little Snitch is, it tracks connections that any software makes to the internet (ie to "phone home") and allows you to block those connections. Imagine my surprise when I opened Calculator.app the other day and Little Snitch popped up asking if I wanted to block a connection that Calculator.app was attempting to make to "wu-calculator.apple.com". After looking through Calculator.app's source code, I figured out that it shares a little bit of code with the iPhone stuff... I'm seeing: http://wu-calculator.apple.com/dgw?imei=APPLE&appt ... Does anyone else notice the word IMEI in there? Yeah. That's what I thought.
It's probably a fair assumption that anything you do with a mobile can be tracked, including your physical location (roughly). "Phoning home" from a desktop application is a somewhat different matter, though plenty of programs seem to do it. Either way, this is all circumstantial at the moment, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out....
Update: According to a Gizmodo story:
OK, you can take your tinfoil hats off now. German site Heise Online has tested Hackint0sh user XianLi's claims about the iPhone sending its IMEI to Apple while accessing the web. According to Heise and other sources, this is not true.
The IMEI is not transmitted, and different iPhones appear to send identical IDs.
