iPhone Location Tracking on Congressional Radar

A couple of days ago, The Guardian in the UK started something of a firestorm with an article about a "secret file" on the iPhone that records and stores the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp.  This has been going on since last June, and as much as a year's worth of coordinates could be stored.

Yesterday, Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file, presented their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco, (where BTW, Jack Dangermond gave a keynote on community collaborative mapping).

Well, today the U.S.Congress got involved.  Referencing the Guardian article,  Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts sent a formal letter of inquiry to Steve Jobs asking what's up with this.  Obviously, such a cache of locations on a phone could prove a huge privacy invasion and wreak damage and havoc in any number of ways should the phone be lost or subject to unauthorized access.  Jobes now has 15 days to respond about why the data is being collected and to explain how this file does not violate Section 222 of the Communications Act which requires expressed customer authorization for such a file.