Hacker News Reader

No, it doesn't seem contradictory, and it sounds like Apple is doing this the right way. If identifiable information never actually leaves my device then where's it going to leak from?

No. If you read the article they explain that they send segments of your trips, and never the start or end segment.

So even if they could find all the segments from YOUR trip (which they can’t, according to what they’ve said) they couldn’t even reconstruct what you were doing, only a few small stretches of road you were on.

That is not new. And it's still not enough, because it's not impossible to reconstruct someone's route if they drive in areas where they are the only ones (or among the few) to send segment data.

That's why you need to do more work, as in two of Google's patents:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8972187B1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US9794373B1

By anonymized, I would take it that they mean no user or device-specific details are linked to the data when it's persisted. So when it's leaked, it's not as though someone can say "this iPhone was at this place at this time".