There seems to be a lot of press about this ‘secretive’ file that is recording location data into a file since the release of iOS 4.0. While I’d definitely agree that the recording of such data seems odd and unnecessary as well as undoubtedly clandestine, one has to remember that the data is not being transmitted to any third party. Yes — there’s the fear that should your device leave your possession, your location data could be available to thieves, private detectives etc, but odds are, there would be far more valuable data on your device, namely credentials for emails, text messages, call logs etc. Data collected is not that accurate, as locations are determined using cell tower triangulation and WiFi geospatial mapping. They do not pinpoint an accurate location.
Despite this sensationalism, I personally, do not approve of Apple’s logging of location data. I do not see the need at all for this file and have no desire for my device to waste battery, IO and RAM to regularly append to this log. Fortunately, there is a solution: encrypt backups on your PC in the future to ensure data is not accessible this way, and to stop logging on the device yourself you can install Untrackered via Cydia. Using a daemon to regularly purge the log seems inefficient — I am sure it is possible within MobileTerminal to mark the file as read-only or immutable with a command like:
chattr +i /private/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db (ran from the directory which contains this file).
However this could cause some nasty exceptions when iOS tries to write to this file, this could cause Springboard to crash into Safe Mode, at least theoretically.
While it seems the story has been hyped up, I think the most interesting part will be when Apple try and justify this data logging, because I am curious to know how it benefits the user. It seems like Apple are trying to justify their actions already…
