As it is, for your cell phone to work its location must be known, and so it must send a signal to the cell towers so the network knows where to send the call. It’s hard to design around that without your own spectrum, but good luck.

We’ve been hearing for a while that if/as the Mac got more market share we would see more viruses and such for the platform, and perhaps that’s true. I see FSF’s and Greenpeace’s efforts to use Apple as the linchpin of their publicity campaigns as a cultural version of such exploits. All’s fair in a good cause, I guess, or is it that the ends justify the means? (To be sure, calling a single blogpost a campaign is overstating it, let’s see if the FSF follows up on it.)

The new iPhone locates you by assisted GPS, which gives an exceptionally precise position compared to just finding you by cell tower, and Apple has also designed the system so that location services (certainly Maps, possibly any service) goes through them and not the carrier, as well as reserving the right to share that data with third parties, albeit in a supposedly-anonymized form. Which is unusual, to say the least – phones don’t usually call home to their manufacturers and carriers don’t usually share private customer data with anyone they feel like.

And it’s also one of the first phones with such accurate GPS, certainly the one with the most publicity around it, so it makes sense to use it as a vehicle for raising concerns about privacy and control with location-based applications.

Apple’s ultratight control of the hardware and software is another big concern with a phone with these new capabilities. Your ability to really control and know what’s being sent back home is non-existent. And I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’m being too paranoid in suggesting that one day the government may come to Apple (and other handset makers) and ask nicely for backdoor access or unauthorized user location transmission, perhaps on a mass scale. Handsets that let you actually control their software could preempt that.

(I won’t call them paranoid, because there’s evidence that authorities here and in China are tracing people by their cell phones. It’s that singling out the iPhone for airing this point implies that other phones don’t have this, ah, misfeature.)