[justsee]

The point I made in another thread on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2468950

Basically by having it stored locally, it lowers the barriers to accessing data, so that it is no longer restricted to law enforcement people seeking telco data.

That changes a lot of things.

For instance imagine you're a police informant or undercover cop: a technically savvy mob would be silly not to hoover up the location data of everyone in their org, which could lead to some interesting discussions.

[angusgr]

For instance imagine you're a police informant or undercover cop: a technically savvy mob would be silly not to hoover up the location data of everyone in their org,

Sure, but if they have root or physical access to the phone (which they need) they can install a realtime tracking snooper to follow you around instead.

I agree this lowers the barrier, but fundamentally it seems to come down to - if you don't want people knowing where you are, don't carry around a GPS-enabled always-on computer in your pocket!

[justsee]

The point to be made here is that Apple's provided almost universal, historical snooping capabilities without any individual actors having to get James Bond on the situation. Every iOS device has the potential to reveal someone made a trip to a police station, or spent a lot of time in a suburb that doesn't match with a particular story.

The fact that people of sufficient technical capability and motivation can always install traffic snoopers with greater resolution / utility doesn't change any of the above?

I suppose this situation is a little like the Firesheep release. Things could already be exploited, but by reducing the effort and skill required it significantly changed the security / privacy situation.

Your final point is a bit of a false dilemma, because Apple can just fix the issue to remove that particular security concern. Of course the device is still tracked by networks, but as discussed the barrier to access that information is probably high enough for many people.

[allwein]

>Every iOS device has the potential to reveal someone made a trip to a police station, or spent a lot of time in a suburb that doesn't match with a particular story.

Sure, it has the potential. But only if the idiot was dumb enough to check into jail from Foursquare (or otherwise use a Location Service).

[wladimir]

Why? A device could have GPS/navigation without any need to store your history any longer than it takes to process the data.

These days, even devices seem to have ulterior motives beyond simply being useful to you. It's crazy. The EFF's "traitorware" is appropriate here.

[allwein]

One would hope that a technically savvy mob would just disable location services on their iPhones in the Settings app and not track this information to begin with.