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Lost your iPhone, iPad or Laptop?

I recently had my iPhone stolen and miraculously returned by the perpetrator after 2 months of fealing guilty. Since then I’ve subscribed to the Apple Mobile Me service which includes Find my iPhone but have started looking at some options for doing the same with your laptop or PC.

Today on the New York Times website I saw an interesting article which showed some options for recovering your laptop from thieves, although none of the recovery companies could really prove they were able to recover the percentages they claimed.

One of the interesting options called “Undercover” spoke about SkyHook, which is a term I heard at an Apple Leadership event a few years ago and have mostly forgotten about.

Available for Macs and iPhones, Undercover takes pictures of a laptop’s user every time the device is turned on. Once the machine is connected to the Internet, it uploads those photos, as well as screen shots of a user’s activity, every six minutes. The laptop’s location is also noted using Skyhook technology, and all the information is sent to the laptop’s rightful owner, who can pass the information on to the local police.

What is Skyhook

You see Skyhook is basically a database of all the Wifi accesspoints of private citizens around the USA / Canada and also in the United Kingdom, which has been collected by people driving around and picking up the wireless access point SSID.

If this sounds like a strange Spy movie or Conspiracy theory, you are right it does. Not sure why its not illegal for companies to do this as surely some form of privacy is lost through the process.

Wikipedia’s definition for Skyhook Wireless is as follows:

At the Macworld Conference & Expo in January 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that both the iPhone and iPod Touch will use Skyhook’s WPS as the primary location engine for Google Maps and other applications.^[42] Skyhook WPS is also available on the Apple iPad, launched in March 2010.

Find my iPhone from Apple

Undercover

Although this method of driving around and using other people’s wireless access points are illegal for normal citizens it seems to be more than fine for companies to do the same and build the technology that allows us to know our location on iPhone’s / Blackberry’s and other smart phone’s without actually having a GPS signal.

It is called Assisted GPS, but still feels a bit creepy.