Android Location Cache Viewer

** For rooted phones, ONLY **
** Apparently versions later than 2.3.3 no longer store these files. Ice Cream Sandwich (Galaxy Nexus) users, you'll get a warning about this. You can run this program, but it won't be able to find any location cache data. **

All the news right now is about how Apple is secretly recording your every location. Well, it turns out Android saves your location history in the exact same way.

Android only saves the last 50 cell locations and the last 200 wifi locations, but that could show a LOT about where you've been.

See where Android thinks you've been. See what others could find out if they had access to your phone.

Some of the points in the cache might be far outside of places you have been - this is due to errors in the databases Android uses to match wifi access points and cell towers to locations. There's nothing I can do about those - these are raw coordinates I am displaying exactly as the phone has saved them.

This requires your phone be rooted and will ask for permission to run as root when it loads. It is only reading a couple of cache files that are on the /data partition. These files aren't readable without root access.

Most of the errors seem to be due to having the Wireless Networks setting (under Settings->Location & Security) turned off. When this is turned off, nothing is cached.

Internet privilege is used for Google Maps only. External data is used for exporting the GPX file.

Full source code is available at:

https://github.com/mbafford/Android-Location-Cache-Viewer