What makes it so "exceptionally stupid and blunt"? It's the same way we deal with access to the Internet. Don't want your kid to get to Playboy.com? Put it on a blacklist. It's an easy way to remove access to certain resources. Some very security-minded people may argue that a whitelist would be more secure (and they would be right) but when you're downloading everything over a cellular connection you would want to keep the size down on something that you hope to only use sparingly. My educated guess is that *THIS* blacklist is truly only used for Core Location because of the name and the fact that the Core Location libraries use it. Yes, I know that Jobs has said there is a "remote kill switch", but I think that is handled through certificate revocation. I may be wrong, and if someone has evidence of it being used elsewhere or library calls from the kernel or other libraries, I will gladly admit that I am wrong.