Peter Batty is VP of geospatial technology at Ubisense. He has worked in the geospatial industry for 20 years and has served as CTO for two leading companies in the industry (and two of the world’s top 200 software companies), Intergraph and Smallworld (now part of GE Energy), as well as a being a founder and CTO of Ten Sails, who provided early stage funding to and later merged with Ubisense. He serves on the Advisory Board of FortiusOne.
In his “geothought” blog, Batty writes:
I believe I have confirmed that Apple is not storing your location, but the (actual or estimated) location of cell towers (and WiFi access points) that are close to you, to help locate you as you move (these are not necessarily towers that you have been in communication with). In the data I have examined there is nothing that is based on the accurate location of the iPhone… In my opinion, if Apple was storing this data in order to know where you had been, they would be storing different, more accurate location data that they have access to.
And, importantly, they are not storing history – the only thing that can be found from the files is when you last visited a general area, not if you made repeat visits. This is especially important as it means that many of the concerns expressed about this data are simply not valid: it cannot be used to determine where you live, or work, or go to school, or who your doctor is.
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]