A better statement is: "Apple is not intentionally recording your moves."
What they're instead doing is, when possible, retrieving cell network / SkyHook (wifi) data about Lat./Long. for towers/APs that your device can see and when it last saw them.
This is for the Location service that an iOS device offers, so that if you choose to provide your location information to an app and it can't get a good GPS lock - this cached information is used to provide a "best guess".
In addition, it's used to provide an accelerated guess as GPS gets a lock (it's the "+" in GPS+).
The timestamp is to provide "last best location". I'm sure the rest (MACs, tower IDs, etc.) can be used to triangulate a better fix based on what's visible and what signal strength to each location is like.
The device caches this information locally because the Lat./Long. of a cell tower / AP will not change - but the timestamp for the last time your phone has "seen" it could be updated, without having to re-hit Apple's servers for the details.
It's being done because: storage is cheap, the amount of data doesn't take much space for thousands of points, it reduces server talk, and it speeds up your GPS/location acquisition for apps that you wish to use it with.
Apple's only mistake is that they didn't encrypt this information. Outside of that, the only other thing they could have done would be to store it purely in RAM - but RAM is at more of a premium (in MB) than flash storage (in GB).
They use an A-GPS chip. The "A" in A-GPS stands for assisted, which means it can be assisted by the cell towers to help find the GPS satellites more quickly. Because of the connection with the cell network, some confuse its capabilities with plain triangulation. It will continue to function as a plain GPS device in the absence of cell service, however.
Most of the points on my map correspond exactly with known locations of my carrier's towers, so the explanation makes sense. However, there are dots in locations where there are no towers. I don't think it is WiFi locations because I do not see any of the places I commonly use WiFi.
You don't need to connect to the network for it to be recorded.
The Skyhook-alike ( Apple rolled its own: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/30/skyhook-loses-a-big-f... ) tech works because your device is able to poll available wireless AP MACs, even if you don't sign into them or know the password. 802.11 headers have a MAC frame that's always broadcast in the clear.
What they're instead doing is, when possible, retrieving cell network / SkyHook (wifi) data about Lat./Long. for towers/APs that your device can see and when it last saw them.
This is for the Location service that an iOS device offers, so that if you choose to provide your location information to an app and it can't get a good GPS lock - this cached information is used to provide a "best guess".
In addition, it's used to provide an accelerated guess as GPS gets a lock (it's the "+" in GPS+).
The timestamp is to provide "last best location". I'm sure the rest (MACs, tower IDs, etc.) can be used to triangulate a better fix based on what's visible and what signal strength to each location is like.
The device caches this information locally because the Lat./Long. of a cell tower / AP will not change - but the timestamp for the last time your phone has "seen" it could be updated, without having to re-hit Apple's servers for the details.
It's being done because: storage is cheap, the amount of data doesn't take much space for thousands of points, it reduces server talk, and it speeds up your GPS/location acquisition for apps that you wish to use it with.
Apple's only mistake is that they didn't encrypt this information. Outside of that, the only other thing they could have done would be to store it purely in RAM - but RAM is at more of a premium (in MB) than flash storage (in GB).