No, it didn’t. Apple made a statement confirming what I’d been suspecting: the consolidated.db file is a cache of cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations to speed up triangulation in Location Services on iOS, period.
“The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.”
So, if you’re worried about Apple tracking you,
“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
I’m hoping this settles things, but—knowing people—I doubt it. Two guys from Florida are planning on suing Apple in a class action suit, which will like go nowhere, and the Congress—as if it didn’t have actual problems to worry about in this country at the moment—is planning on holding hearings on this weighty, troublesome matter.
It turns out, not quite relatedly, that Facebook has been putting tracking cookies onto the computers of people who aren’t themselves Facebook users, but have simply visited sites that use Facebook Connect. Facebook’s explanation? “Oops.”
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