Apple Updating iOS To Address Privacy Concerns

wiredmikey writes "[Apple] said that over the next few weeks it would release a software update for iOS that would reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up the cache, and delete the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. Additionally, Apple said that in the next major iOS software release the cache would be encrypted on the iPhone, though a timeline for that was not provided."

Comments

direct link

[bidule]

Why not use the direct link as nothing was added and some was cut?

Re:direct link

[Americano]

Just a wild, unscientific guess, but I'd say it's because linking to Apple's press release directly means that SecurityWeek doesn't get ad impressions from the slashdotting. The link goes to a SecurityWeek Article by Mike Lennon; TFS submitted by "wiredmikey," whose profile identifies him as "SecurityWeek Editor", and links to SecurityWeek.

Connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Bug?

[mangino]

I don't know that I agree with this. I've worked building software for more than 15 years and I can tell you that the likelihood of somebody accurately capturing something like this in a requirements document is very close to zero. After all, this isn't a feature we're talking about, it's an implementation detail of a performance optimization. The requirement would likely be something like

"Must be able to detect a location within 0.2s if wifi is active or can locate at least 3 cell tower ids"

the rest is how the programmer chose to make it work. If you are creating requirements to the level of detail needed to fully specify purge behavior of a cache database, you're never going to finish your requirements document.