Apple, like any other tech company, views your concept of privacy as an annoying bother you should really just set aside. After all, they only have your best interests at heart! Like when they put together a map that tells anybody who knows where to look where you go, how often you go there, and how long you stay there! See, that’s not creepy at all!
Before you ask, yes, this is real, it’s been around since at least iOS 7 and Apple just adds to the skeeve factor here by making it hard to find. To dig it out, you have to select Privacy from Settings, choose Location Services, go all the way down to the bottom of that menu and choose System Services, and then scroll down to “Frequent Locations.” Click on one of your locations, and there’s the map. Click through to a location on that map, and you’ll get a list of days and times you were at that location.
It’s a detailed one, too; a few of our team put this to the test and not only found the map, but found it had date and time stamps that show exactly where they’d been and how long. The divorce jokes write themselves, but once again we have to point out to a tech company that this kind of data, even if it really is only stored on the device like Apple claims, can be enormously dangerous. It’s only “stored locally” until somebody figures out how to get it out of your phone.
You can, fortunately, disable Frequent Locations from the menu where you find the map; one Uproxxian found that it had been automatically disabled. But if you’ve got an iPhone and value your privacy, don’t take that for granted; go shut down this map.
(via Thrillist)