Happy Data Privacy Week from Apple

Happy Data Privacy Week. While it’s sad the cause of data privacy has moved several steps back in the last 12 months — particularly in the UK — Apple did contribute something to boost privacy this week, blocking (participating) mobile carriers from accurately tracking your location based on your network signal.

What this means is that whereas before carriers were able to gather accurate info about where you are, Apple’s system now only lets them see roughly where you happen to be. The enhancement only affects network location, so any apps you allow to access location data will still function, as that’s provided by Apple’s Location Services. Find My also continues to work.

Making money from where you are

Why do carriers collect this data?

There are two main reasons: 

• They’ve been required to provide location data for phones used to call emergency services since 2001, which Apple says the system still supports. 
• Your phone also uses your location data to help maintain quality of service by identifying the most appropriate cell tower.

The reason Apple’s move is a good contribution to data privacy is because carriers are known to sell this location data to third-party aggregators and data brokers who use it for commercial purposes, including ad targeting. 

While the information is likely to be anonymized, data brokers are quite capable of connecting the information to other data stacks, such as location data provided to them by the apps you are using, to build fairly accurate pictures of where you are. 

“Data gathered from smartphones enables service providers to infer a wide range of personal information about their users, such as their traits, their personality, and their demographics. This personal information can be made available to third parties, such as advertisers, sometimes unbeknownst to the users. Leveraging location information, advertisers can serve ads micro-targeted to users based on the places they visited. Understanding the types of information that can be extracted from location data and implications in terms of user privacy is of critical importance,” an important research report warned five years ago. 

Controversially, it was revealed last October that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses a location surveillance tool to track mobile devices. (Let’s hope that Apple’s latest improvement to network privacy protection might help de-escalate tensions, as conversation doesn’t yet seem to have been enough.

‘This is surveillance’

Not so many years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook discussed this seedy side of the data trade: “Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” he said. “These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm.

“This is surveillance,” he warned.

Even today, much of the trade in carrier-derived location information is unregulated. And while some carriers claim to have stopped selling this information to aggregators, not all have done so. It’s entirely possible that those carriers who do not soon announce support for Apple’s new privacy protection are effectively admitting that they make a little extra cash on the side trading this data. At least, that’s certainly how it can be construed.

Apple says carriers supporting the feature at present include Telekom in Germany, EE and BT in the UK, AIS and True in Thailand, and Boost Mobile in the US. You should contact your carrier to check on their deployment plans if this protection is important to you.

Where is the feature?

When you upgrade to iOS 26.3 or iPad OS 26.3 you will find Apple’s new “limit precise location” feature in Settings>Cellular>Cellular Data Options, scroll down to Limit Precise Location and turn the protection on or off. You might need to restart your device.

Control over precise location is only available to Apple devices with an Apple 5G modem, a short list that currently includes the iPhone 16e, 5G iPad Pro, and iPhone Air. While probably the last iPhones to do so, the iPhone 17 series continues to use a Qualcomm modem, so the feature doesn’t work on those. In some cases, privacy lovers might also want to disable Apple’s hard-to-find “significant locations” feature, or just switch on Lockdown Mode for the best possible way to secure their devices. 

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