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"The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple."Some are located more than 100 miles away because the database contains every location ever logged. Despite the fact that hotspots and cell towers over the horizon cannot play a role in accurately determining your location, Apple's response is intended to create the impression that they play such a role and thus justify permanent storage.
Furthermore, short of magic, there is no way to send a relevant subset of the crowd sourced data to an iPhone without first knowing both the location of the iPhone and its unique identity.
>"The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."
Apple is trying to create the impression that storing the data from which location can be triangulated is somehow significantly different from storing the actual location and again creating misdirection with the reference to "more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."
>"5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data."
In an interesting shift of language, Apple's answer is technically about the person's location rather than the location of the iPhone and it could be argued that in this context "source" refers to the person using the iPhone rather than the identity of the iPhone. Given that "cannot" rather than "do not" is used, the limitation does not correlate with something in an algorithm since an algorithm can be changed to identify the specific iPhone.