People love to panic prematurely and when it comes to the Internet’s hive mind, there is nothing more worthy of our collective panic than a good privacy scandal. A user on German security forum Protecus recently discovered that a feature in iOS 7 continuously tracks users’ locations and stores them in a log. According to Apple’s software, this service tracks your location in order to “learn places you frequently visit in order to provide useful location-related information” in the new Notification Center. Of course, anytime you put the words “track” and “location” in the same sentence, things are bound to get a little hairy — and such is the case with this newly discovered iOS 7 feature.
While some might be intrigued by a system that could potentially enrich users’ smartphone experiences by providing smart new features based on location, a service like this clearly is not for everyone. But as iMore’s Rene Ritchie points out, locationgate should have taught us that it is far, far too early to panic.
iOS 7 is currently beta software intended only for developers. We have no idea what this feature will look like when iOS 7 finally launches. We have no idea if it will be enabled by default or if it will be opt-in, as Apple’s current location services are (you have to enable them during setup).
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