The iPhone 11 Pro appears to have a habit of collecting users’ location information at irregular intervals, even though users have banned applications and system services.
According to security journalist Brian Krebs, the iPhone 11 Pro is designed to periodically ping the GPS module to collect location data. This even if users have expressly prohibited these apps and system services.
Krebs demonstrated the activity in a video taken with an 11 Pro with Apple’s latest iOS version 13.2.3. Despite manual deactivation of individual location services in the iPhone settings, GPS data will continue to be collected for certain apps and system services. Interestingly, the iPhone 11 Pro also searches for GPS data if the location services switch of an app is never set.
Apple writes in a privacy statement available on the Smartphone under the menu item Site Services that the smartphone “periodically sends the geo-tagged locations of nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers (if supported by a device) to Apple in anonymous and encrypted form to Apple for the expansion of this mass-sourced database of WiFi hotspots and cell towers. “
“Apparently, this model (and possibly other iPhone 11 models as well) has some system services that can request location data and can not be disabled by users without completely turning off location services, as the arrow icon also appears after individually disabling all system services use the site, appears regularly, “explains Krebs. As the short clip shows, Apple’s iOS location indicator, a small arrow icon that shows the current or current usage of GPS data, appears next to applications and services that have been manually disabled in Settings.
