Your Smart Phone Has Been Tracking Your Every Move - iPhone Edition

You might not realise it but your iPhone has been recording exactly where you’ve been and how long you spent there.

 

According to Apple, the data is collected “in order to learn places that are significant to you” and improve traffic routing services. The company says the data is stored locally on your iPhone and will not be accessed elsewhere or shared with anyone else.

But it’s weird, fascinating, and just a little bit scary to realise that your phone contains a perfect record of where you’ve been in the last month or so. That includes the exact time you arrived at and left anywhere: your office, a bar, that person’s house.

To access Frequent Locations, open your iPhone’s “Settings” menu, select “Privacy”, then “Location Services”, then scroll all the way down to “System Services”.

 

In System Services scroll all the way down to the bottom, press “Frequent Locations” and look at the “History” section. Click on one of the area names to see where you’ve been.

 

The list on the left records five broad areas where you’ve spent time in the last month or so. If you select one of these then you’ll see something like the map on the right.

The software works out where you spend most of the daytime and designates that as your work address. It then does the same for your home address.

And your iPhone knows exactly when you were at each location.

 

Frequent Locations knows to the minute how long you spent in that restaurant and how long that quick coffee with a friend took out of your day.

More than anything else, Frequent Locations records the exact time that you stayed over at someone’s house. And the location.