We all know that Apple is miles ahead of Google when it comes to privacy for its customers. Google is often in the limelight for sharing user data, or tracking users even after they have opted out of such tracking. Hell, it gets sued for such things all the time. However, did you know that your iPhone keeps a pretty detailed account of all the places you visit as well?
Most of you may not know about it, but there’s something called ‘Significant Locations’ on your iPhone that keeps a detailed track of all the places you visit, including what time you went there, and how many times you have visited that location.
Now this may sound horrifying, but don’t worry. Significant Locations are end to end encrypted, which means Apple can’t read your location data even if it wanted to. Plus, this location data is kept on your iPhone, and is used by apps like Photos to show you things like those Memories it keeps generating.
It’s not really something you need to freak out about, and Apple isn’t doing anything nefarious here. It’s just an interesting thing that not a lot of Apple lovers and iPhone users probably know about. I know I didn’t know about it, and I’m a pretty big iPhone fan.
Anyway, if you want, you can stop your iPhone from collecting this information as well, and completely delete your location history that it may have already collected. Here’s how to do that.
- Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services.
- Scroll down and tap on ‘System Services‘ and then on ‘Significant Locations‘.
- Simply turn off the toggle to disable Significant Locations. If you want to delete your location history, just tap on ‘Clear History‘ and you’re done.
While you’re here, you can also give Apple’s privacy policy a read. It’s pretty detailed and gives a good idea of how the company shares your data, and what data is encrypted.
