iPhone Privacy Patcher utility released: Stop sending your IMEI to Apple!

Tags: all-seeing eye, iphone, paranoia, paranoid cat, patcher, privacy, stocks, tinfoil, weather

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So now that it's out that Apple is spying on you, people have been clamoring for a way to hide your IMEI from the all-seeing eye of Apple's Stocks and Weather applications. These apps send your IMEI as well as your iPhone firmware version to Apple for their nefarious usage statistic processing.

This is a big deal, because the IMEI is sent in plaintext, over any Wi-fi network you may currently be connected to. So anyone listening on that network will be able to grab your IMEI and do stuff with it, like, um, yeah, I'm not sure they can do anything with it.

Until now you just had to avoid the Stocks and Weather apps and/or wrap your phone in tin foil to prevent them from reading your thoughts.

Concomitantly, I have produced a simple command-line utility to patch out the nefarious code from Stocks and Weather allowing you to check your portfolio and the weather without worrying about sending your IMEI to Apple.

What the utility does is scan for the URL that the app uses to talk to Apple, and zeroes out the part where it includes your IMEI.

Download now (binary and source)

Source is included because open-source is the bomb. It also makes backups because you may want to start sending your IMEI again. You know, if they get to you.

Right now the patcher does not prevent Stocks or Weather from functioning but as the Stocks and Weather functionality is served from Apple, they could easily disable patched applications remotely. So if they stop working you'll have a fair idea why.

And while you're installing dangerous 3rd party software onto your iPhone, why not also try some hilarious 3rd party software too? You won't regret it.

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