Please remove your tinfoil hats: iPhone does not send IMEI info to Apple

“OK, you can take your tinfoil hats off now. German site Heise Online has tested Hackint0sh user XianLi’s claims about the iPhone sending its IMEI to Apple while accessing the web. According to Heise and other sources, this is not true,” Jesus Diaz reports for Gizmodo.

Turns out, “these IDs are identical in all iPhones… The most plausible explanation: the codes could be just application identifiers. Rumor smashed,” Diaz reports.

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacVicta” for the heads up.]

20 Comments

  1. This secondary article refuting the XianLi claims will barely muffle the iPhone spying hysteria. The original story is just too juicy not to repeat. The fact that it is false won’t get in the way. Too many benefit from mud thrown on the iPhone.

  2. wow, really, just like all the rest of the paranoid Apple spy stories so far, this one is BS too. color me shocked….

    so, how many people will learn from this and think before they panic when the next version of this story comes out?

    more than 2? i doubt it…..

  3. like someone said on the other thread regarding this ‘news’, you don’t have any privacy. I took a psych. test for fun.. just added my initials, on the results page I was stunned to see my full name. It was in all lower caps just like how I typed it when setting up my mac.

    Guess its a good time to remind myself that security is not so much a state of affairs is it as a process.

  4. @ibookfast

    You may have the autofill function turned in your browser. It’s probably no big deal that that happened to you but still I understand your concern. Whenever my name and/or personal info pops up unrequested on a web page I freak out a little. And it’s not because I’m a spy either. Because I’m not.

  5. …paranoia, paranoia, everybody’s out to get me…

    nah, i’m glad to see this turned out to be phony boloney, but as mentioned earlier, this will be miss construed and used against the iphone. very few will get the info disclaiming the accusation. and most will still say the accusation is true. apple had me a little worried for a minute.

  6. Speaking of conspiracies, MDN, what’s with this checking the “Notify me of follow-up comments” by default?

    I replied once and left it checked by accident. Then I had to add a rule in Mail.app to automatically delete all those annoying messages as they came in!

    Not nice!

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.