Location Info Is Not All That Sinister

Summary

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There has been a lot of misinformation in the news over the past week about a location database on your iPhone. Let me try to clear up the confusion for iPhone users and give a bit of background for other smartphone users.

Modern smartphones such as the iPhone, Android and a variety of other platforms have location services that allow applications to use your GPS coordinates to determine your location and provide relevant data to your current location. Apps such as Yelp show nearby restaurants. Foursquare shows places with deals nearby. Google Maps allows you to get directions from one place to another.

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Extract

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Location Info Is Not All That Sinister

In addition to GPS, smartphones sometimes use cell-tower triangulation to determine location. In this instance, the phone looks at nearby cell tow...

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