From the FAQ:

To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately.

Although since it's open source, it shouldn't be too hard to remove this restriction.

I just went through the code and it is indeed pretty trivial to remove both restrictions. If you want to do it, in the iPhoneTrackingAppDelegate implementation file:

* Change the precision variable on line 149 to something bigger than 100 (10000 did it for me) - this will mark points in the map with higher precision:

  const float precision = 10000;

* Change the timeBucket variable on line 180 to change the date precision (the app currently gives you weekly based data, but it can go as far a data point every second). You could also just "cheat" and change the notion of weekInSeconds:

  const float weekInSeconds = (7*24*60*60);

Yo! I realise the likelihood of you seeing this is very low, but is there any chance you would do a brief runthrough of how to implement this code? I'm very interested to increase the precision of this app but don't know enough and can't locate the iphonetrackingappdelegate file you speak of..

I'll check back often! Thanks..!

You need a Mac, git, and XCode

in terminal type: 'git clone https://github.com/petewarden/iPhoneTracker.git

open that new iPhoneTracker folder, and load up the xcodeproj ( iPhoneTracking.xcodeproj )

in there go to iPhoneTrackingAppDelegate.m on the left sidebar

from that look at line 179 for changing the time inbetween registering, and look at line 149 for the locational precision

with those changed, hit the play button in the top left corner and the app should build and run

Thanks for posting the instructions. After doing this, it's easy to see that the tracking data is way off base quite a lot. And interestingly, places I visit a lot but never use my location for it has very few data points for. In fact, there's only one even near my office, which I visit nearly 5 days a week. Every week.

1 data point / second would be cool on flights, but of little practical use on the ground and would seem to be data overkill.