Your smartphone could be logging information about your whereabouts.

Sound a little Orwellian? Psh, yeah. Does it align all too well with the ‘Big Brother’ persona? Yeah, I thought so too, but the fact of the matter is that many users who value privacy are being outsmarted by their smartphones.

Last week, the smartphone-toting population erupted in outrage when a stream of stories broke revealing that the most popular smartphones are storing and/or transmitting user location data.

Apple, Google and Microsoft have since been under attack for having created operating systems that systematically log or transmit geo-based information. This will be the only time I concede a win to BlackBerry for anything; but touché, RIM, apparently security is a bigger issue than I had surmised.

So what exactly does this mean? Well, the details vary based on which specific operating system your phone runs on, but the gist of it is that your phone has created a log of your movements without your explicit consent.

Any iPhone running on iOS4 or higher has been systematically logging your latitude and longitude locations, and then creating a consolidated file of this information. And then copying the file to any computer you sync your iPhone to. Oh, and then there’s the whole problem that the information is not encrypted. (For the non-tech savvy: Encrypting data is the practice of using a key to disguise your information as something unintelligible unless said key is known.)

Playing on consumer fears, on April 21, a Steve Jobs parody Twitter account, creatively named ‘falseSteveJobs,’ tweeted, ‘I know where you are.’

But don’t freak out just yet. The log of your whereabouts is never transmitted anywhere. The only real privacy issue is the fact that the information gathered by the phone is unencrypted.

So while the information is really just sitting there gathering dust, it’s still dangerous. As we all learn one way or another, no digitized information is private. If it’s out there, there is someone who has the ability to access it.

The main question is how to stop this data gathering. Easy — shut off your location services feature. Not so easy — this entails losing functionality of all geo-based app services.

What’s a gal to do? Shut off my geo-locators and risk losing the three Foursquare mayor ships I’m clinging to? I think not.

Smartphone users running phones off of Android or Windows platforms should have similar concerns, although the logs kept by these operating systems are not nearly as extensive as that kept by iOS4. The Android OS caps its geo-log at 200 entries, and Microsoft only keeps information on your single most recent location entry.

But for these platforms it’s not the data itself that should raise concern, but rather where that data is going.

Anything running on Google’s Android OS constantly transmits location data directly to Google. If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be. Most endeavors undertaken by Google have been for the purpose of gathering data and developing something out of it. And the same goes for Microsoft. The information being gathered is for the improvement of each company to better serve its customers.

What it boils down to in terms of Apple’s spying faux pas is that the practice isn’t as disturbing as the fact that it has been done so inconspicuously. For Google and Microsoft, the creepiest part is that the data is transmitted elsewhere, back to the company.

Essentially, while this is a tad disturbing, especially considering it’s been shrouded in mystery, this is only a problem if the user has something to hide. If you don’t have a warrant out for your arrest or some insidious travel pattern that could be incriminating, the data is nothing more than just numbers that really are of no consequence to anyone except for the companies that are trying to improve their services.

Jessica Smith is a junior information management and technology and television, radio and film dual major. Her column appears every Tuesday, and she can be reached at jlsmit22@syr.edu.

Published on April 25, 2011 at 12:00 pm