A better statement is: "Apple is not intentionally recording your moves." What they're instead doing is, when possible, retrieving cell network / SkyHook (wifi

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).