Location where a cell is Apple
If you allow third-party apps or websites to use your current location, you are subject to their terms and privacy policy and practices.
How to Turn Off Location Services on Your Smartphone - Consumer Reports
You should review the terms, privacy policies, and practices of such apps and websites to understand how they use your location and other information. Your Apple Watch may use the location of your paired iPhone if it is nearby. By enabling Location Services, location-based system services such as these will also be enabled: Traffic: If you are physically moving for example, traveling in a car , your iPhone will periodically send GPS locations and travel speed information in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting a crowd-sourced road traffic database.
Popular Near Me: Your iPhone will periodically send locations of where and when you have purchased or used apps in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to improve a crowd-sourced database that may be used to offer geographically relevant apps and other Apple products and services. Significant Locations: Your iPhone and iCloud connected devices will keep track of places you have recently been, as well as how often and when you visited them, in order to learn places that are significant to you.
This data is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple. It is used to provide you with personalized services, such as predictive traffic routing, and to build better Memories in Photos.
Apple® iPhone® - Turn GPS Location On / Off
Location-Based Suggestions: The location of your iPhone will be sent to Apple to provide more relevant recommendations. If you turn off Location Services for location-based suggestions, your precise location will not be sent to Apple. If police wanted to, they could subpoena the iPhone's location database file when investigating a suspect.
That file contains too much information for this to even be justified.
Imagine if you were suspected of a crime and police wanted to know where you were at 5 p. They could subpoena your iPhone, dig into this file and, looking at the various data points, get a good idea of where you were at that time. Sure, that sounds like it could be a useful practice for busting bad criminals, but what about all that other data? With that file police can not only find out where you were at 5 p. Thursday, but also that you see a therapist every Monday morning, or simply that you were somewhere that you'd want to keep to yourself — private matters.
As tempting as it may be to say, "They're suspected for a crime, they deserve it," even suspects deserve privacy. They're suspects, after all, not criminals yet. The fact that law enforcement can easily get more information than necessary is not a positive thing.
How your device uses Location Services
With that said, the chances are small that your iPhone is going to get hacked or stolen, or that you're going to be suspected of a crime we would hope. So there's no reason to freak out. But we should care about the implications of a rich file of geographic data living on our iOS devices offering no customer benefit, creating digital footprints that we can't erase.
Fortunately, Apple is a media giant, and customer trust is too valuable for the company to lose.
It's likely we'll see Apple issue a software update soon tweaking the geodata-storage method, hopefully with a full explanation. View Comments. Sponsored Stories Powered By Outbrain. More gear. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone.
Locate a device in Find My iPhone on iCloud.com
The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon see Software Update section below. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
iCloud User Guide
The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly see Software Update section below. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly see Software Update section below.
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.