iOS’s Significant Locations list tracks every location visited
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
If you're a privacy paranoid—well you shouldn't have a smartphone at all—but if you have an iPhone, at the very least I'd expect you to comprehensively circumnavigate the privacy section in Settings. It's all quite clearly organised and labelled. If you're serious about your privacy and you didn't do that, you're not very good at being a privacy paranoid.
Oh well, it will either fizzle or become the next thing people will actually rage about.
You can disable essentially all data collection, the hardware encryption on the device is the only one I trust, their business model so far does not revolve around you being the product but rather a consumer and you get years of guaranteed security updates.
The information doesn’t leave your phone and isn’t accessible by other applications.
I'm not saying trust Apple, but it's difficult to list many other large companies I'd trust more.
And at least with an iPhone I only have to trust Apple. They make the vast bulk of the product and for all the stuff they don't do, I'm confident that they're doing good due diligence on their upstream suppliers. They'll be checking that TSMC has manufactured their chips without changes. They'll know every trivial detail about the supply chain into the Foxconn factories. They know the entirety of the product they're selling better than any other phone maker, unquestionably.
Buy a Samsung Galaxy and then you have to trust at least Samsung and Google. But I don't necessarily trust them to do due diligence on upstream suppliers, so I suppose you have to add Qualcomm to that list. And if your phone has been shipped with third party software, you have to add all of those third party software companies...
Apple currently doesn't have any method of making money off this information that we know about, and has a lot of goodwill for protecting people's privacy.[0] In contrast, companies like Google and Amazon have well established ways of making money off similar information, and less than stellar reputations. So they'll constantly have a balancing act of "how creepy can we be?" They're trading off marginal losses (the occasional quitter) vs revenue.
Apple is the guy who doesn't drink. Google, Amazon and Facebook are the ones at the bar saying "I can probably handle one more".
[0] To be clear, I'm sure they could ink a deal to make money from this info very quickly. It's just that they don't have anything outstanding.
At a minimum, I think it would be a big business model change. If they just exploited this particular bit of information, it would be a small financial gain with a big loss of trust. To make it worthwhile, they'd have to find ways to monetize tons of user data, at the expense of a lot of trust.
It’s been a major complaint from advertisers and media organisations that Apple doesn’t share data with them that Google et al do.
I checked mine and it was surprisingly spotty. Of the places I go to daily, it only had records 50-66% of the time.
"When you turn off “location history” Google still tracks your location when you use several of its key services including Maps, search and the weather. Here’s how to really turn all of it off..."[0]
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-tu...
1 System Preferences
2 Privacy
3 Location Services
4 System Services
5 Significant Locations
I could maybe see the argument for putting System services on the Location Services page in a separate section, but that's the only layer I'd remove if I were being parsimonious.
It's a reach, but if I was trying to inflate the "layers" count that's how I'd do it.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/location_...