Really – then why does it store it? IIRC, they have phones with a whole years worth of locations on them.

Apple is not collecting this information. The government is not collecting this information. Only your phone is collecting it (and backing it up to your PC with everything else), and it’s doing it because it can use that information to provide a more accurate position (without GPS). It doesn’t really need to keep years worth of data, but I suspect it’s doing so only because nobody bothered to code cleanup logic.

Seriously guys- it *could* be a conspiracy, and it would certainly be more interesting if it was. But it’s probably not.

Apple has patents on spying on you.

Apple’s phone keeps tabs on you, recording your movements.

Apple wants to move to the cloud to better help you.

Apple backs this data up via iTunes.

Just because AT&T can track you, don’t mean Apple should be able to track you as well. This logic is fallacious. Cell tower triangulation is relatively well understood, it is technically feasible and has been used in popular culture TV shows for a while. This is well known. But where in your license agreement did you sign away the rights to your location to Apple?

It’s not nice to spy on people, it’s not nice to plan to spy on people. That’s what many of you are not getting. We didn’t agree to be spied upon by Apple. At most we agreed to AT&T and the law enforcement agencies who would leverage a WARRANT.

Also, odd that the map shows points instead of lines. Is this data sampled infrequently? Otherwise it would be more of a track, no?

It’s just not the data the data the current hullaballoo is about, which, by the way, is most certainly not generated *on* the device but pulled from servers and stored on the device to allow for faster GPS services w/ unnecessary calls.

I think you need to do some research on how iPhones use GPS. Its most definitely real GPS. It falls back to assisted GPS when it can’t get a GPS signal.

Google is so voracious in its data mining that they have to use the motto “Don’t Be Evil” to try to make themselves feel not so… evil. Apple has long had an attitude of doing what they want and telling the customer this is what they want.

I am sure this is not for nefarious reasons like tracking people going to nudie bars while on the clock and extorting them. But it still isn’t cool.

This is why I keep my phone as ‘dumb’ as possible. I still use the Motorola ‘brick’, with a custom lead lining to keep the brain cancer at bay.

Everytime I take the subway, my location is reported at whatever above-ground transmitter that is servicing Metro. One of which seems to be located near a runway at National Airport. I swear I’m not actually standing out there, ever.

If implemented correctly, it will actually lead to *better* privacy, since none of the dozens location calls need outside information and will solely reside on the the machine, with neither Apple nor Google nor Skyhook being any wiser.

Yes, I know i’m getting snarky, but after days of reading bullshit on the level of birthers and creationists, I’m getting a little frustrated.

These same people are the ones that if the phone did NOT do that, they would complain and whine that when they lost the damn thing, Apple couldn’t do thing one to help them find it.

People….you want smart phones with GPS mapping and location services to turn it off in case its lost or stolen…then you are going to get this “tracking” to go along with it. You can not live in the grid, but be off the grid at the same time. Want the smart phone and tech and all the bells and whistles, well, there ya go. Don’t like the big brother feel, then don’t have this type of tech.

Simple as that folks.

People are freaking out that their GPS knows where its been. Think about that.

Next they will be complaining that their phone keeps a record of who has called them.

Nothing seems to be collecting or parsing this data currently, but I can understand why some people might want to prevent that from changing in the future.

We’ve known for years that the cell phone companies keep this data on us, and that the police can get it with a warrant.

There reasonable evidence that the cell companies and piping this data about us directly to Homeland Security *without* a warrant.

And now you find that *you* have a copy of this data, owned by only you, on a computer you *own and control,* and you are calling it a privacy violation?

And now you want Apple to delete this data for you so only the corporations and the government have it? And this will make you feel safer?

How?

i’d totally opt-in if it improved my overall experience with locative apps.

And I’m implying that the information is working both ways, because it is. A “smartphone” keeping track of cell towers doesn’t really seem far fetched. Actually ANY phone in the last decade doing this doesn’t seem far fetched. At the same time your phone does this, the phone company can do the same.

To me this is a non-issue. I’m not doing something wrong. If my Garmin GPS decided to phone the cops because I was speeding then I’d be pissed off and chuck it out the window (where it’s probably tell them I’m littering as well). My phone keeping track of cell towers in order to work better doesn’t seem to be a flaw, it’s the design.

“This is location data that the device itself stores”….and seems to pass off copies to computers it syncs to.

Shockingly, it turns out that the built in back-up function backs up the phone. And if you are worried about someone going through that back-up the location data is the least of your problems. This is not only working as intended but more or less working as advertised.

If this concerns you use the thoughtfully included encryption option that has also been included. It’s a single button.

B. The Apple lawyer said they needed to exploit this data to produce good products. This means they reserve the right to use it.

C. What’s different here is that we knew AT&T et al. had access to our roaming data. Not Apple. This is an instance where Apple reserves the right to use this data.

This is different than AT&T knowing where you are, this is different than Apple not using because the lawyer already said they reserve the right to leverage this information, as well this information is synced to your itunes. So no we’re not over-reacting, this is a legitimate concern.

Here’s my tracking data, plotted in Google Earth:

http://imgur.com/a/Emon7

As I’d expect, there are location points in Minnesota and in the Houston area.

I live near the bottom left corner of the blob around Minneapolis. I work over near the lower right corner of the blob. There are large swaths of my daily drive that have no location points. Similarly, there are points in locations I have not visited in dozens of years. There are points in locations where I have never been in my 49 years. Certainly, in the last year, I have not physically been in every corner of the Twin Cities, as this plot would seem to indicate.

Zoomed in, there are three blobs around the town I live in. None anywhere near my house.

That blob up at the top surrounds the Brainerd area. I’ve been there once this year, over a weekend for a hockey tournament. I drove up there, through that empty area with no location points, and once there my range was limited to trips of a few miles to and from ice rinks via the same two routes. The upper left of that blob is 24 miles away from anywhere I went that weekend. A true track would be a narrow line from mid-left to lower-right.

Late last year, I took a trip to Houston. I took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel, walked around about a four-block area in downtown Houston for three days, then took the shuttle back to the airport. This location data certainly doesn’t reflect my actual locations during that trip.

So, leaving aside any privacy concerns, this data obviously does not represent any sort of log of where I’ve been.