Recently I’ve seen a surge of people suggesting that going to oo.apple.com would stop storing your whereabouts on your iPhone/iPad 3G, an issue that has cropped up in the past few days after iPhoneTracker has been released. As far as I can tell – and see on my own iPhone because I opted out last year – opting out of iAds doesn’t have any effect on storing locations. In short: Yes, I opted out. Yes, I still have a few thousand entries in the database going back to some time last year.
So far I couldn’t find any hint that this opt-out page does anything else than opt you out of the iAd network. Also see Apple’s knowledge base article on this – and the screenshot above. I’m not saying that opting out of iAds is a bad idea, but it won’t stop the location data being saved on your device and in your backups (that you should encrypt).
As Gruber pointed out this whole thing is probably going to be fixed in an upcoming iOS update.
By the way, this overall problem isn’t actually news. Android is doing the same thing – grab your copy of the Android location dumper here – but keeps the stored data to a minimum. In other words, Android’s doing it correct.
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