Sure, the article is a reasonable refutation to that part of the O'Reilly claim, and that is an important fact to clarify.
The article goes further though, and claims it's "not 'recording your moves'" and is just a "general place at a general time". I don't you can say that point-blank. As stated, I think that it's going to be entirely location-dependent as to whether the database can be treated as a "record of your moves" or not.
The author says he was using his phone and the GPS often.
If they wanted to track your moves and you have turned on the GPS, why doesn't it just, y'know, use the GPS data? Instead Apple tries to track your moves using cell towers?
Seems like the only way this would be a record of your moves would be by coincidence.
To quote from my original comment:
Apple probably didn't set out to track users ... That doesn't mean the data won't be enough to track movements in urbanised areas.
Whether this is really a scandal, I don't know. But it certainly seems surprising to me.
My understanding is hte iPhone doens't actually have a GPS receiver in it at all. It only uses a fuzzily defined "assisted GPS" which is basically based completely on 3g towers.
The original iPhone had no GPS and always used cell tower triangulation. This varied a lot - I remember in Manhattan, NY it could track me almost to the street number; on the other hand I once turned it on in a moving car in rural NSW, Australia and it drew a circle approximately 500km in diameter.
The article goes further though, and claims it's "not 'recording your moves'" and is just a "general place at a general time". I don't you can say that point-blank. As stated, I think that it's going to be entirely location-dependent as to whether the database can be treated as a "record of your moves" or not.