Update (April 27, 2011): Apple released today an official statement regarding what Twitter’s been calling “Locationgate.” Have a look for how they plan to address the issue.

Fresh on the heels of national coverage of location-based “stalker app” Creepy, there’s been a lot of buzz this week about iPhoneTracker, an open-source Mac application that literally maps out where your iPhone or cellular-enabled iPad has been. What’s causing such a stir, though, is that the program isn’t just sniffing out your social media check-ins – apparently, that’s so last week. What iPhoneTracker does is aggregate your iPhone’s cell tower check-in data, which isn’t stored by your mobile provider (as is the case with most phones, and that data is hidden behind legal protection) but rather in a database file both on your iPhone and on the computer with which you sync that phone.

An unencrypted database file. Which, if your computer isn’t password-protected, your spouse, co-workers or kids could dig into.

Is this scary? CNN certainly thinks so. But before you ditch the iPhone for an Android – which as far as folks know at present doesn’t pull any such shenanigans – you may want to think through what this data actually means. (Correction: A Wall Street Journal article published April 22 states that the Android does, in fact, regularly transmit user location data back to Google.) Also, there are a few other things to note: First, Apple has only been storing this data on your phone since the release of iOS 4 last June. Also, since the data comes from cell tower triangulation, this only applies to working iPhones and cell-enabled iPads – so, if your iPad only supports wi-fi or you’re using your friend’s old no-plan iPhone as a glorified iPod Touch, none of this applies to you.

For the sake of science – and maybe a tiny bit of paranoia – I ran iPhone Tracker on my personal laptop, the one I use for syncing my phone. And here’s what I got:

So now what? For starters, if you were a PI or angry spouse poring through all those dots on the maps, it actually wouldn’t reveal much more than you could figure out about me via a thorough Internet search – even excluding location-based stuff like my Foursquare check-ins, which give away a lot more info. Sure, you can zoom in on Lawrence, see the density of dots over the east part of town and conclude that I probably live somewhere around there. Or you could just read my blog, backtrack through my Twitter stream or see the sort of comments I post on community Web sites and gather pretty much the same thing.

Then there’s the part about cell towers being less accurate than GPS when it comes to pinpointing your true location – sometimes considerably less accurate. For example, I haven’t been anywhere in New Mexico in at least 10 years, even though the map has me there for a whole cluster of dots.

So what do you think – evil conspiracy on the part of Big Brother Apple, really no big deal or somewhere in between? Let us know in the comments.