The announcement yesterday morning may have been unexpected, but the revelations were not surprising. Yet today we find ourselves asking, how did we get to this point? Rumors, conspiracy theories, and unsubstantiated claims do not belong in the media, yet for the last week these had reached a new high as allegations, new and old, were endlessly repeated. Virtually every mainstream media outlet covered this story extensively, giving airtime, bandwidth and column space to unsupported claims and...

Last week two O’Reilly analysts posted a video explaining that Apple’s iOS 4, the operating system used on the iPhone and iPad, contained code that automatically logged a variety of time-stamped data that could be used to pinpoint where a device had been.This would allow someone with access to this data to construct a detailed picture of the device’s location history. Notably, the phone did not log GPS location data, but instead recorded location-related data based on cell towers and wifi networks...