Respected Apple commentator John Gruber says Apple's "secret tracking" on iPhones and 3G iPads could be a bug or simply a mistake.
Privacy campaigners are furious after it was revealed the devices store users time-stamped location data on a file in the iOS operating system, which is transferred to computers during syncing.
Writing in his Daring Fireball blog, Gruber says the file is used to store location data and should get automatically and regularly wiped:
"My little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn't, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that's meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I'd wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update."Apple is still silent on the row.
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