Yesterday we were talking about a online diagnostic system of the problems of the iDevices that Apple would launch in the near future and a few hours after the publication of the information about it appeared others about a patent registered to Apple for the same type of technology. Apple's patented system works offline, through iTunes, and analyzes logs for firmware updates, for the locations where the terminal was used, for various "events" in which it was involved, plus many, many others.
The log may be generated periodically (eg, every 5 milliseconds, every 30 minutes, every 5 hours, after every reset, or at any other time based or event based or environment based event occurs). Each generated log may be stored on the Apple device or uploaded to a remote entity, and each log may be retained or overwritten by a more recently generated log depending on available storage space and/or processing capabilities, for example.
Now it should be noted that the terminal will contain logs about locations, events (recording photos/films, etc.) plus other confidential information that you do not want to share with Apple. The company claims that the logs will only reflect relevant information that will help diagnose possible problems with the device and nothing more. Of course, Apple can declare anything but in reality do completely different things. The system is currently only in the patent stage and I think it will be quite a while before we see it implemented in some device or in iTunes.
