Stop Your iPhone from Recording Your Frequent Locations
Do Your iPhone Recording Your Frequent Locations? This is How To Stop It
Just like Google’s location service, your iPhone tracks where you go and saves that information so you can view later on a map. If you don’t want your iPhone tracking your every move, though, it only takes a few seconds to see and clear these locations and turn the feature off.
Unlike Google, thankfully, Apple’s feature is not quite as invasive, and allows you to disable it without losing essential functionality.
First, open the Settings on your iPhone and then tap open “Privacy”.
In the Privacy settings, tap on “Location Services”, then tap “System Services”.
In System Services, tap open “Frequent Locations”.
Here, you have the option of turning Frequent Locations off. It is on by default, but you may prefer that your phone not track everywhere you go.
Under the History heading, you will see all the places your iPhone has recorded.
If you tap a location, it will show frequent locations for a particular area on a map. Go ahead and tap on a location at the bottom of the map.
Now you can see where you were, on what day, and what times.
Maybe that’s a little too much information and you want to clear everything. No problem, just tap the “Clear History” button at the bottom of System Services settings page. A confirmation will pop up and you can tap “Clear History” to delete it or “Cancel” if you change your mind.
As we mentioned, this feature isn’t quite as intrusive as Google’s, and as far as we know, the information is kept locally and not reported back to Apple.
Nevertheless, it’s not essential to your iPhone, turning it off won’t seemingly cripple other features. You will still be able to navigate and use Maps. Moreover, because the information is apparently stored locally, no one else should be able to access it.
In any event, it seems like more of a curiosity or gimmick than anything of real value. Perhaps it could be useful to a parent who wants to see where their child has been hanging out, or maybe other apps could call upon this data and find some use from it.