A Comparison of Geo-tagging in Mobile Internet Browsing Applications on iOS and Android.

Nowadays there is almost no crime committed without a trace of digital evidence, and since the advanced functionality of mobile devices today can be exploited to assist in crime, the need for mobile forensics is imperative. Many of the mobile applications available today, including internet browsers, will request the user’s permission to access their current location when in use. This geolocation data is subsequently stored and managed by that application's underlying database files. If recovered from a device during a forensic investigation, such GPS evidence and track points could hold major evidentiary value for a case. The aim of this paper is to examine and compare to what extent geolocation data is available from the iOS and Android operating systems. We focus particularly on geolocation data recovered from internet browsing applications, comparing the native Safari and Browser apps with Google Chrome, downloaded on to both platforms. All browsers were used over a period of several days at various locations to generate comparable test data for analysis. Results show considerable differences not only in the storage locations and formats, but also in the amount of geolocation data stored by different browsers and on different operating systems.