This morning, as I was leaving the house for work, I wanted to check the weather forecast so started tapping and swiping away at my newish iPhone to find the weather screen. I was startled to see some text appear which said
Right now, it would take you about 11 minutes to drive to [workplace address]
(It looked a bit like this (not my phone I stress)).
It was correct, it would indeed take me about that long to drive to work at that time, but I was genuinely taken aback. After a bit of research I see that this was a new feature in iOS7, (and, indeed, the weather widget was lost at the same time). Sure enough, I find that my new phone has been logging frequently visited locations, but must have also been logging the fact that I travel between A (home) and B (work) frequently. It is described by Apple as being a way to
Allow your iPhone to learn places you frequently visit in order to provide useful location-related information
I’m not going to argue whether this is a useful service or not, or even whether on general principles it is concerning or not. What I am going to say is that, because I’ve not had much time recently to sit down and learn about my new phone, to customise it in the most privacy-friendly way, I’ve been saddled with a default setting which has captured an extraordinarily accurate dataset about my travel habits without my knowledge. And yes, I know that tracking is a prerequisite of mobile phone functionality, but I would just rather it was, as default, limited to the bare minimum.
p.s. to turn off this default setting, navigate to Settings/Privacy/Location Services [scroll to very bottom]/System Services/Frequent Locations and set to “off”
