A few things to keep in mind when reading the hysterical stories in the media about this:
1) The cellular companies have always tracked you, and freely give this information to law enforcement. In the U.S., it's a simple $1.50 fee to request a "
pen register" giving your location history. Under current US law, your location data is not "content", thus does not require a warrant / court order.
So if you are worried about being tracked by the government, then keep your phone turned off. And an iPhone doesn't track you any more than any other phone does.
2) This newly-discovered iPhone location database is not taken from GPS coordinates - it's simply triangulated approximate locations based on cell towers.
It's not terribly accurate, in other words - it's usually off by several hundred meters. Your iPhone is saving this data to improve location identification for all those apps we love that rely on this data.
3) For someone to access this data, they would have to have either physical access to your computer or be able to break your password remotely (extremely unlikely, and actually impossible if you keep File Sharing turned off).
4) There's an easy way to prevent this data from being read by others: in iTunes, choose "Encrypt iPhone backups". Now the data will be scrambled, so even if somebody gains access to the file, they won't be able to read it.
5)
The data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form, and the company can't identify the source of the data.
6) So what? I'm sorry, but how is this different from someone being able to follow me down the street and writing it all down? Me, I've been freely giving out my location data on my travel blog for years, and never experienced any problems from it. It's nice for people to see where I've been. Granted, in rare cases (stalkers, abused spouses) precautions must be taken. And those precautions are easy to take.
I'm not an Apple apologist, despite my profession and chosen operating system - but I think this story has gotten blown out of proportion.
Yes, Apple should have been more upfront than simply burying this in the terms of service agreement that we always check off and never read. Yes, they should have encrypted this file by default. But from what I've learned about this case, I really don't think they were being nefarious, nor were even planning on using this data for advertising or other commoditization. It sounds like it was simply
part of their feedback systems for improving signal quality and location databases for everyone's benefit.
Anyway, they're going to be making some changes in the coming weeks to address these concerns: "Apple says it will shortly release a software update that will reduce the size of the database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up this cache and delete it entirely when Location Services is turned off. The company says it sees no need for the phone to store more than seven days of this data." From what I've read, it was simply a programmer's oversight that allowed this data to be saved for so long - not Big Brother with a Master Plan.
If there's any company to be worried about, it's your ISP - they know far more about you than anyone else. They can read your email, know what websites you're browsing, etc.
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