I think there are ways to design APIs to be more private, but noone seems to do it.
For instance, one way to figure out your time zone is to send your location to a server, which will return the time zone.
Another more private way might be to load a list of location vs timezones for a region of the US, then calculate your timezone locally.
Why do you think companies are not defaulting to this behavior? it feels like the right time to be working on closed-circuit software solutions as an alternative measure.
"By enabling Location Services for your devices, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services."
It will also send your location to Apple when no app is requesting your location:
"If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations."
Unlike on Android, you cannot get your location without sending this data to Apple:
"To use features such as these, you must enable Location Services on your iPhone"
Turn off networking. You can still get your location via GPS, but there is no way to send this back to Apple.
> By enabling Location Services for your devices
You seem to be confusing Location Services with location data. Location Services are the value adds mentioned in the support article, from which it's clear that they largely require sending your location to work.
Technically true, but this makes your iPhone a dumber dumb phone than it already is, and I doubt anybody would seriously use this mitigation.
> You seem to be confusing Location Services with location data.
You cannot get location data without enabling Location Services.
"Location Services allows Apple and third-party apps and websites to gather and use information based on the current location of your iPhone or Apple Watch to provide a variety of location-based services. For example, an app might use your location data and location search query to help you find nearby coffee shops or theaters, or your device may set its time zone automatically based on your current location."
People don't usually do this purposefully as a "mitigation", yes; however it is still a useful feature to have when dealing with poor connectivity. But more on topic, you seem to be talking about Android somehow doing something else? Is there a way that Android lets you get location services (see below) without sending your location to Google?
> this makes your iPhone a dumber dumb phone than it already is
If you're going to argue, please do so with at least the barest hint of good faith please.
> You cannot get location data without enabling Location Services.
You can get basic location data by turning on your GPS and making a couple of CoreLocation calls. You can get additional location information by sending this location (or a location query) to Apple to get some additional information about it, as mentioned in the quote you shared. In any case, we both know exactly what information we're talking about: you can figure out where you are without talking to Apple, and if you want to know about restaurants or turn off the sprinklers when you get to work then you're going to have to go through them. Whatever you choose to call it is not relevant.
You can't without enabling Location Services. If you could, that would be a huge security hole because users can only disable Location Services and not CoreLocation.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207092
> however it is still a useful feature to have when dealing with poor connectivity.
In order to not send your location to Apple, you have to leave the network off. The location will be stored on the device and synced to Apple later if not. Nobody is going to do that just to not send their location to Apple. They'll get a phone that they are in control of instead.
> Is there a way that Android lets you get location services (see below) without sending your location to Google?
Yes. Just request location permission and use the location API. If you want AGPS functionality, you still have to request the location permission, but you need to call a Google API (or an Amazon API on Amazon devices, etc.).
> If you're going to argue, please do so with at least the barest hint of good faith please.
I'm just pointing out how ridiculous your mitigation is using an equally ridiculous description.
You are right. I was looking in the disassembly of CoreLocation and misread where the controls for this were (and what they were named in the UI)–see below. Sorry about that.
> In order to not send your location to Apple, you have to leave the network off.
There's a bunch of toggles to switch off sending location data to Apple, specifically, in the Location Services settings page. So you can have Location Services on but not send anything to Apple, unless the app does so itself.
> The location will be stored on the device and synced to Apple later if not.
From the code, it seemed like this was for syncing frequent locations (which is end-to-end encrypted).
> They'll get a phone that they are in control of instead.
I am assuming you're claiming this is an Android device?
> I'm just pointing out how ridiculous your mitigation is using an equally ridiculous description.
You're really not; you're coming in, whether you're serious or not, with the argument that iPhones are "dumb", which is not useful or even related to the point. Countering my "ridiculous mitigation" (which I have not even described as a mitigation, mind you; I was just pointing out that you can get data from GPS without sending anything to Apple; if anything the "mitigation" I will point you to now is the set of switches that I mentioned before) with another one just does not help keep this conversation on track. It's quite literally flamebait.
There is no such setting. https://hifutureself.com/ios-location-system-services-settin...
It is not enough to disable Location Services for Apple apps. If any app requests location, even non-Apple apps, your location will be sent to Apple, as I showed above.
> I am assuming you're claiming this is an Android device?
You can use them without sending data anywhere you don't want.
> iPhones are "dumb",
I was very clearly riffing off the term "smartphone." A phone that has network disabled as you suggested cannot be called smart. What's the opposite of smart?