I often travel internationally (with no data roaming) and I've noticed that the iPhone's A-GPS is incapable of determining my location when I arrive in a new place, even if I've pre-loaded my route/maps in the maps application prior to arrival. But once I've connected to the internet - even for a few seconds - my phone is permanently able to track itself in that city, even after I've left and returned months later.<p>It's going to be unfortunate when I can't do this anymore because of people blowing this issue out of proportion. I hope Apple will at least provide the option of caching this data for longer than 7 days.
<i>3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?<p>The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested</i><p>This actually makes sense - looking at the logs on my iPhone and iPad, the locations where pretty far away from the places where I usually roam, and actually there was a very great deal of places where I've never been, not even close.
Ironically, shrinking the geolocation cache will result in more frequent requests to the server, making it theoretically easier for Apple to track your location.
I use location services on an iPod touch almost daily and without a network connection. The location cache is currently limited by size. It seems to hold about a small city's worth of wifi hotspot coordinates, which is downloaded in large blocks at a time.<p>Reducing the size of the wifi location cache to a mere 7 days could severely reduce the usefulness of that feature.<p>I really hope they're not killing a great feature because of some hysteria and bad reporting.
This is a perfectly reasonable explanation.<p>I have seen this more and more lately, the standard reaction to anything Apple in the tech community is pitchforks. I have a feeling subconsciously we all want Apple to fail at something and try to latch on to anything remotely blamable.
<i>5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?</i><p><i>No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data</i><p>I hate it when companies use 'encrypted' like it would somehow make your data more secure in their hands. They mean here they use something like SSL so snooping the traffic is impossible, but of course they can still read what you're sending, otherwise the information would be useless to them.<p>The claim that apple can't identify the source of the data is also highly dubious. If they wanted to, they could probably correlate your IP with the IP used to access your iTunes account. That they don't do this is one thing, but claiming that they can't is something else.<p>EDIT: come on HN, since when did we start downvoting stuff you don't want to hear? This is a valid point, if you have critizism just leave a comment. If you want to downvote something, do it on the summary comments. Sheesh.
<i>The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested</i><p><i>Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.</i><p>I think a lot of folks who spent money on Apple products are going to be happy with this, and for that I'm glad.<p>But I didn't find this release adequate. Apple is not tracking me -- they are keeping a time-stamped list of nearby access points on my device, which effectively is a huge breadcrumb trail of everywhere I've been and when. Apple doesn't know it's me -- because the data is encrypted, which makes no sense at all. Whether data is encrypted or not is meaningless. Can I go to the Apple server logs and track incoming downloads and associate them with the data or not? I strongly suspect the answer is "yes". If not, that's great, but that wasn't described here.<p>The killer omission? That Apple has been doing all of this -- which is at the very least controversial -- without informing the users in a manner in which they clearly understood it. The response we see is simply a reaction. The "bug" here is getting caught.<p>I don't necessarily see anything nefarious at work, but I'm troubled with the idea that Apple was keeping a list of my whereabouts (the nearest access point, for those of you who are literally-minded) without my knowing it. That's a pretty serious breach of user trust, no matter how many times it was covered in the 47-page lawyered-up doc that nobody reads.<p>But like I said, folks are willing to cut Apple lots of slack, and they deserve it. But hell if I'd want to see something like this happen again, from any manufacturer. I'm not so sure that vendors are getting the point.
<i>Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:<p>- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,<p>- ceases backing up this cache, and<p>- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.</i><p>Looks reasonable to me. The only thing missing that I'd like to see is an option to opt out of the tracking data (anonymous or not).
1. This explanation seems to ignore the timestamps that are stored along with the hotspots/towers data. What do the timestamps represent? The time when the cache was downloaded onto the phone?<p>2. Speculatively, the way this seems to work is, that the phone identifies a tower, say, with ID12345. It then looks up the crowdsourced database for the tower with this ID, and queries it for all towers/hotspots within X miles radius. The result of the query is logged into the consolidated.db file, along with the current timestamp.<p>3. I don't know about the 100 miles number, but for me, in an urban setting, it certainly seems to be accurate upto approximately a mile or so, that together with the timestamp, gives a reasonably accurate picture of where I've been, and when.
So it was a bug after all.<p>This was one of the best responses out of a big corporation I've seen in ages. They even explain the function of it, not often that you see that.
<i>8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.</i><p>Interesting. Apple generally does not pre-release information about upcoming products, at all. They must have felt their hand forced in this, or Jobs is not at the helm of this press release (which I'm sure he is).
Great clear response from Apple. Patch is a good outcome, turning off location service actually stopping tracking and limitation to 7 days are very good moves.
Meh. Everyone sucks at press releases this week (thinking about you, Sony). This just seems so much more bloodless, dispassionate, and frank than it ought to. It's obnoxiously contrary to write "The iPhone is not logging your location."<p>I mean, really? That's just argumentative. My mom is gonna look at the location history visualizers people wrote and respond "Really, Apple? Cause this looks very much like <i>log</i> of my <i>locations</i>".<p>Somebody at Apple's PR needs an ass-kicking. This ought to be a video with a short transcription from someone on the phone team (not Jobs) that just explains it without getting defensive of semantically tricky.
A huge hole in this press release is how apps use location information. An app can easily log a user's location and send it anywhere along with whatever other data the app has access to.
><i>"The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple."</i><p>Some are located more than 100 miles away because the database contains every location ever logged. Despite the fact that hotspots and cell towers over the horizon cannot play a role in accurately determining your location, Apple's response is intended to create the impression that they play such a role and thus justify permanent storage.<p>Furthermore, short of magic, there is no way to send a relevant subset of the crowd sourced data to an iPhone without first knowing both the location of the iPhone and its unique identity.<p>><i>"The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."</i><p>Apple is trying to create the impression that storing the data from which location can be triangulated is somehow significantly different from storing the actual location and again creating misdirection with the reference to "more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."<p>><i>"5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data."</i><p>In an interesting shift of language, Apple's answer is technically about the person's location rather than the location of the iPhone and it could be argued that in this context "source" refers to the person using the iPhone rather than the identity of the iPhone. Given that "cannot" rather than "do not" is used, the limitation does not correlate with something in an algorithm since an algorithm can be changed to identify the specific iPhone.
>Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.<p>Alright...<p>>Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.<p>...... The collection of anonymous traffic data involves tracking your location to determine what road you're on and what speed you're going. They can't even get their story straight.
"The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location"<p>So, it's logging your rough location...
> Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.<p>Wow!
"In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone."<p>Great, thanks a lot! Now I no longer have the option of viewing what law enforcement will be able to get anyways. Nor will I have access to what essentially was a pretty neat database to look through.
this q&a is misleading a bit. iphone downloads locations around hotspots u have already been close to by timestamping, and it means ur approximate location+timestamp was logged indefinitely on ur phone and copied to PC, though indirect.<p>the whole q&a is a simple game words to trick users.
`apple is not tracking ur location` but `your approximate location is downloaded, timestamped and stored on ur mobile phone due to a bug`<p>this whole wording is can't even trick a child.<p>look at the result.
From the press release:<p>Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.<p>....<p>Let me guess...Where, all roads lead to Apple?<p>EDIT: I posted this fully knowing it will be unpopular. But reading the press release gave me the feeling that Apple was using a sleight of hands by turning the public's focus from the privacy and security issues this incident has amplified and brought to the public's view, and instead is saying "Gee..We were doing y'all a favor by building a better maps app, and now you come along and screwed that up". Security is not an afterthought people. Hasn't the Sony fiasco that is still unraveling taught us anything?