Apple has confirmed the existence of a “Frequent Locations” option in iOS 7 beta 5, reports say. Leaving it on allows an iPhone or iPad to “learn places you frequently visit in order to provide useful location-related information,” according to descriptive text. People can moreover see a rough map of where they’ve been since installing iOS 7, and even how long and how often they’ve been to a particular place.
Tracking is essential to apps like Siri and Reminders, which need to know where a person lives and works, for instance, for some functions to work. Some people have expressed concern however, since the idea of a viewable location history is reminiscent of the 2011 “locationgate,” when it was discovered that iOS 4 was not only tracking location histories but creating backups of them that could be accessed by someone with a stolen/borrowed device. iOS 4.3 halted the creation of these backups.
iOS 7’s history display may be intended to offer more transparency. At the moment, iOS 6 lacks not only the display, but also an option to turn off history tracking without also disabling location services entirely.
