In response to the recent furor over iOS keeping an unencrypted database of the device's location on users phones and computers, Apple has published a Q&A about the issue, clarifying what the data is for, how it's used, and some changes they're going to be making in the next OS release.
Their first answer is direct:
1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
Apple goes on to explain that the location data on the phone is not the location of the device itself, but rather a subset of their huge database of cell towers and WiFi networks which is used to pinpoint the devices location more quickly when requested, many of which are miles away from your actual location.
All location-aware mobile devices do something like this—if they actually fired up the GPS and waited for a lock before they used any location services, those services would be much less usable. Instead, they rely on crowd-sourced databases (their own, or from companies like Skyhook) to quickly get an approximate location, and then fine-tune it from there if needed using the phone's hardware.
Apple admits that they are storing much more of this database than they need to, and calls that a bug. They say they'll be reducing the cache to 7 days of data in the next release of iOS, and that they're going to stop syncing the cache to your computer. They also promise that in the next major release of iOS, the cache on the phone will be encrypted.
This strikes me as a clear and most-likely-true response to the issue. Of course, people who hate Apple will claim it's bullshit, they're the most evil company EVAH, blah blah blah, but those people are not serious. It was clear early in this controversy that all other smartphone OSes do something similar to what Apple was doing, and there has never been any evidence that it was being used for any purpose other than to locate the phone during the course of regular use. The changes they're going to make are good changes, and sound like legitimate bug fixes.
