My iPhone has a life of its own

Apr 26, 2011

So the latest news is that your iPhone tracks your location, and you can use this to get a view of where you’ve been. So of course, I had to have a look, and here’s my map - where I’ve been in the state of Victoria recently:

Well, it’s a strange thing. I’ve been all over Melbourne. And I’ve driven to Sydney - that’s the line north/east from Melbourne towards the top of the map. And I’ve also been all the way east too. As for the presence down the coast to the west - I haven’t been over that way since September last year - before I even got this phone. How does that work?

There’s a few trips I’ve made that it doesn’t know about. Like a week at Dromana - south from Melbourne around the bay.

But the bit that confuses me - is that spur across the top reaching from about Holbrook towards Cooma - I haven’t been on that road for nearly a decade. Perhaps my iPhone made a trip of it’s own without letting me know? The same applies to the scattering of points through the country north of Melbourne - if only I got out as much as my iPhone apparently does. I checked, and my wife’s iPhone gets out on it’s own nearly as much as mine.

Or perhaps the iPhone’s ability to track location is pretty poor in Australia. But I’m sure that’s not Apple’s fault. We can surely blame Telstra instead ;-)

p.s. Some people are all worried about using iPhone location tracking data for some kind of investigative purposes. I thought that might be a problem for some. But now I’ve looked at the data - not so much.