Someone told me that my Apple iPhone 6 Plus actually tracks everywhere I go and has a log of frequent locations and when I was there with the phone? Creepy! How do I disable this “feature”?
You are correct that the iPhone, like all smartphones, keeps track of where you are at any given time. If you think about all the geolocation-based apps you run and features you rely on — like “find closest pizza” or checking in to a location in Facebook — it’s all built around this capability. To me, the issue isn’t whether the phone should be tracking me, it’s what happens to the data and whether some nefarious person or agency could extract it and use it for evil or exploitive purposes.
So I’ll show you where the setting is and how to disable it, but will encourage you to not just be reactive to rumors but ask instead whether the service that’s offered by the phone knowing what areas you spend the most time justifies keeping this enabled or not. For me, I have no major problems with it and leave it enabled because I like that my own iPhone 6 can pre-fetch geolocation-based data for areas where I spend the most time.
On your iPhone go to Settings and look for Privacy:
Tap on Privacy and you’ll see this set of options:
You’ll want to tap on Location Services from here, but I will note that the list of apps and permissions granted for each is a good place to ensure that your apps are playing nice with the data collection capabilities of the iPhone, including, yes, location tracking. That can be something you do after you’re done looking at the Frequent Locations info, okay?
So you’ve tapped on “Location Services” now. Here’s what you’ll see:
Notice the differences in how things are shown here. The “Snarf” app can access location, but only while I’m actively using the app, while the “Weather” app can constantly assess my current location even if it’s just running in the background. You can grant or deny any of these services to any of the apps if you’re so desirous, but let’s again stay focused! Tap on System Services…
There it is! “Frequent Locations”. There’s lots of other info to consider on this screen, including a collection of so-called Product Improvement options that send your phone data to Apple for aggregate analysis. Most people leave that enabled but if that bothers you, here’s where you can disable it. Then again, it’s Apple Maps, so “Improve Maps” is probably something we should all leave enabled! 🙂
Tap on Frequent Locations and you’ll see where you hang out:
I live and work in Boulder, Colorado, with Longmont, Louisville and Broomfield as the next three closest cities I spend lots of time in, so this data is no surprise at all. Further, you can drill down further if you really want to know what it’s recording, as you can see when I tap on Boulder, Colorado here:
If you overlaid a map of coffee shops in Boulder, Colorado you would quickly be able to ascertain where I spend much of my time, needless to say. For a given location (and do note that it’s not offering up exact street addresses) you can even tap and get a time log. Here’s mine for “Yarmouth Ave”:
What’s there? Amante Uptown, one of my favorite coffee shops in Boulder. No surprise there, and you can see that sometimes I spend a lot of time sitting there, drinking coffee and working, like on 7/8/15, when I was there from 9.33am to 3.00pm!
This is a gold mine for surveillance and stalking, of course, but it’s also locked into your phone and I think people who say that any information on your phone is just waiting to be stolen by bad guys are doing a disservice to us smartphone users. Different people are going to interpret this differently and you can certainly see that there’s some forensic value to this data if I was with the Boulder Police Department and wanted to figure out where the owner of a particular device spent the most time. But that’s an outlier and for the vast majority of us, I just don’t believe this poses a legitimate threat to your privacy. You might disagree, which is of course your right, and if that’s the case, disable Frequent Location tracking on your phone, tap on “Clear History” too, and the problem’s solved.
Awesome, we are getting deep into it. Well done sir!