You’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about how Apple is tracking your every move via the GPS on your iPhone. Or at least that’s what the headlines say.
The reality is a bit different, as spelled out in this press release from Apple:
The upshot is that the database in question contains the GPS locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers and their GPS coordinates. The nefarious purpose of this information? To give faster location data to apps that request it with your permission (“Application XYZ wants to use your location …”) Details are in the Q & A.
The location data is an amalgamation of locations from all iPhone users in a given area with no personally identifying information included. It is not your specific location, it is the location of various radio sources in the area surrounding where you’ve been. Up to 100 miles away in fact. Using GPS alone could take several minutes for a result or may not be possible at all if you are indoors for example. Using this crowd sourced data gives results in seconds.
There is a bone fide bug in Apple’s current implementation in that the cached data is kept much longer than it should be, possibly up to a year where Android phones using the same technique correctly only keep the last week or so worth of cached data. According to the Q & A, Apple will be fixing this soon.
Anyway, them’s the facts. Feel free to chime in with your comments.
2011-04-29 Update
Macworld has an excellent article explaining exactly how Apple’s GPS-assist works:
What’s amazing to me is not just how inaccurate some of the original reporting was, one article stated flat out that Apple tracks your exact location, but how some of the follow up reports continue to get it wrong.