A researcher has determined that the iPhone 11 Pro intermittently attempts to collect users’ location data, despite system settings.
KrebsOnSecurity, a computer security publication, found that even if the phone’s settings on apps and system services indicated that data shouldn’t be requested, it still tries to collect location information.
Apple’s privacy policy says that the device “will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations.”
Brian Krebs, the security reporter behind the publication, found that some system services cannot be disabled by users without turning off location services. Krebs says that there is a privacy flaw that exists either within iOS 13 or the new flagship phone.
He says he sent a video to the tech giant in November detailing his discovery of the vulnerability. An Apple engineer wrote back to him saying that they did not see any “actual security implications.”
“It is expected behaviour that the Location Services icon appears in the status bar when Location Services is enabled. The icon appears for system services that do not have a switch in Settings,” the engineer wrote.
Source: KrebsOnSecurity Via: CNET
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