Figuring that I’ve got nothing to hide or steal, I’d always privileged convenience over any privacy and security protocols. Not anymore.
I plugged my phone into my computer and opened an application called Lantern, a forensics program for investigating iPhones and iPads. Ten minutes later, I’m staring at everything my iPhone knows about me. About 14,000 text messages, 1,350 words in my personal dictionary, 1,450 Facebook contacts, tens of thousands of locations pings, every website I’ve ever visited, what locations I’ve mapped, my emails going back a month, my photos with geolocation data attached and how many times I checked my email on March 24 or any day for that matter. Want to reconstruct a night? Lantern has a time line that combines all my communications and photos in one neat interface. While most of it is invisible during normal operations, there is a record of every single thing I’ve done with this phone, which also happens to form a pretty good record of my life.
Figuring that I’ve got nothing to hide or steal, I’d always privileged convenience over any privacy and security protocols. Not anymore. Immediately after trying out Lantern, I enabled the iPhone’s passcode and set it to erase all data on the phone after 10 failed attempts. This thing remembers more about where I’ve been and what I’ve said than I do, and I’m damn sure I don’t want it falling into anyone’s hands.
by contributors@theatlantic.com (Alexis Madrigal), On Monday April 25, 2011, 10:33 am EDT
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