TiVo May Not Judge You, But Your iPhone Does

If your iPhone could talk, what would it say about you?  Would it perturb you if it turned out that late at night, it was quietly calling Cupertino to gab with Steve Jobs about the mundane details of your daily life?

It looks like Apple is tracking iPhone users data including IMEI number, IP address and stock quote preferences (amongst other things) through a hidden string in the Weather.app and Stocks.app iPhone applications.

From this information, Apple could build a profile on users.  Where they travel, where they spend their free time, where they work, where they invest their money, what they browse, etc etc.  Obviously most users would like to be able to control who has access to this information.  If they connect this data with the credit card that you used to purchase the iPhone (remember, you can't use cash anymore), they could build an even bigger profile on you.
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Whether or not the backlash from this will cause Apple to change its policy remains to be seen.  However, there are alreadly lots of people deleting the Stocks.app and Weather.apps from their iPhones and donning their tinfoil hats.

(HT: TechCrunch)