Law enforcement have known about iPhone tracking since at least last year
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
Android is a dream for someone like me (forensic analyst). It is easy to get data off, and is chock full of all sorts of cached information. iPhone is more difficult, and can sometimes be very hit and miss in what you can get off it.
I've used pretty much all of the tools listed on that page, and none are as magical as they claim. One of the best is .XRY, which is my preference because for a lot of phones you can use it to extract a raw memory dump and analyse it more carefully/deeply.
The key thing to know here is that all phones cache location information like this in some form. Older phones used to only cache a little bit, but usually enough to recover some previous cell sites. Modern phones, with more location features, more memory and more advances OS's, just store more of this information.
IMO it's not so much that LE have been keeping it deliberately quiet. I mean, I for one figured it was fairly obvious. The story here is, IMO, it being sent back to Apple/Google etc. Not that the data is cached.
Just curious...
Most of the work in my experience is fraud related, probably around 80% of it. But this can vary (with the time of year, current economic/political climate etc.). As exciting as it sometimes gets to sound (and indeed, sometimes is) 99% of digital forensics is sheer. absolute. boredom. :)
Also, the phone is NOT constantly tracking your location. It only logs a new location (a) when you launch a location-aware app, e.g. Facebook, Maps etc. And (b) when you have never been to that location before.
It does not log the amount of times you have visited the location.
I suspect Apple is planning to do something cool with this Data, because of the way it is synced across Computer and Phone. Keep in mind however, the Data cannot be used to Track you constantly, only to see where you have been in the past, but, the log will never update to show that you visited a certain location more than once. Hope this helps!
Among computer forensics specialists, those location logs--which record nearby cell tower coordinates and time stamps and cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services
And worse still, the article clearly shows this data is already being used by law enforcement for unmonitored tracking.
Also, I didn't see the part of the article where law enforcement is using this for unmonitored tracking. They can pull the data off your phone once when they arrest you. But how do they continue to keep pulling the data off your phone? If the police take my phone from me every day, I don't think that qualifies as unmonitored.