You've missed the point: look at that map again. There's no way you could tell, with even the slightest degree of reliability, that my phone was "on the train" at all from the location information available.

I haven't thanked you yet. I last worked for Apple in 2001, and the work that I did was pre-iPhone, pre-iPod, pre-OS X. Since then, I've been publicly, and vocally, critical of a number of things Apple has done, and I was quite skeptical about the iPhone when it was introduced—I presented, for example, at "LUGradio Live" in San Francisco in 2008 on, among other things, why I didn't believe the iPhone had the chance of a snowball in hell against the unstoppable force of community-based open source goodness on mobile devices. Shows how much I knew. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4794227130234037617&hl=en# So, unless you're supposing some sort of mind control on Apple's part, exerted on decade-old ex-employees, I don't see that any particular "disclaimer", beyond the clear mention on the easily accessible "About" page, is necessary, nor does my discussing the facts that I turned up represent any sort of a "conflict of interest". Frankly, you're making yourself look a little silly by suggesting that it is without knowing the facts of the matter. You'd have done a lot better to stick to something relevant instead. You're welcome.

I guess the only reasonable response, if one is this concerned, would be to abandon the use of cell phones and computers entirely, not to mention paper and pens (since your partner, her friends, your mates, your kids, your stepkids, your foster kids, their friends, random criminals, etc., etc., etc., might find something you'd written down).

iOS Location Services are "Opt In". You disable them entirely, if you want, by turning off the switch in the settings. Any app which wishes to use Location Services to determine your location on an iPhone has to get your permission to do so first.

"Yet, no matter how good your blog post is, it would have been better journalism to include in the summary link(s) to other source(s) with different perspective(s)." You mean, like the Wired and Atlantic articles that I linked to at the end of my posting...?

They do: Location Services is what makes "Where's my iPhone?" possible.

This is excellent information; I don't know why this comment hasn't been modded up.

For the record, if it were Microsoft, my response would be identical: tempest; teapot.

"... one of my buddies might get ad revenue if I link his no-name blog on the main page..." Given that there aren't any ads on my blog for me to get revenue from, and I don't have any "buddies" who are moderators on slashdot (that I know of), I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.

My point was that if you view the file being backed up to your PC as a "vulnerability", then encrypting it should ease you worries. While we haven't heard from Apple what the reason for the file is, it seems pretty reasonable to me that it's a database of known cell tower and WiFi locations, to be used to rapidly "triangulate" your location, when possible, if you have an application that wants to use iOS' Location Services. This idea would seem to be supported by the existence of a similar location cache on Android.

Why not simply set your iPhone backups to be encrypted...?

Yes, it says that pretty clearly, right there on the blog.

There's no evidence that the data is being "migrated" off the phone, "persistently" or otherwise.