Uneasy silence reports that hidden inside the weather and stocks applications on the iPhone there’s some code to send your phone IMEI number and other details to a special Apple URL.
Any attempts to modify the URL to exclude the IMEI information will not allow you to retrieve any information in the “Stocks” and “Weather” apps. It is still unknown if any other applications leak information to Apple HQ.
Here’s what Apple’s privacy disclaimer says on the matter:
When you interact with Apple, we may collect personal information relevant to the situation, such as your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, and contact preferences; your credit card information and information about the Apple products you own, such as their serial numbers and date of purchase; and information relating to a support or service issue.
Please folks at Apple, the whole locked thing was bad enough, and now this.
I’m still a big Apple fan and, although I don’t own one yet, have been toying with the idea of buying an iPhone for a while… iPod Touch it is then. And wireless turned off.
http://www.winandmac.com/mobile/iphone/prevent-apple-tracking-iphones-imei/
commenter said I am wrong. Is it wrong, really?
Your solution should work all right. All you’re doing is changing the imei parameter in the url to a static “00″. %@ in this case represents a variable to be replaced with your phone’s imei.
However, I’d be careful because I read somewhere that the applications (weather, stocks) stop working as soon as you get rid of the call.
It would be interesting to see what Apple is responding to that call, if you can figure out whether apple is sending back some sort of “activation” code to start the app the entire thing can be simply replicated/hacked.
The soilution to replace %@ by 00 works fine. After replacing you have to set the file attribute to 755 otherwise the application “will stop”.
For the time being this work but we could imagine that in the future apple will check the type of code sent before to allow yahoo to send the awaiting data. I think that this data transmission is innocent and it is just for licence fee process between yahoo and apple. Maybe by this modification we will got the information without any payment from apple to yahoo !!!
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