Same behavior possibly happening on entire iPhone 11 lineup

Dec 4, 2019 11:33 GMT  ·  By

An iPhone 11 Pro with individually disabled location tracking for all apps and system services keeps collecting location information, according to a recent discovery.

On iPhones, users are allowed to manually disable location tracking per each app or at system level. If the location services are manually disabled for absolutely all apps and services displayed in the setting screen, the iPhone 11 Pro continues to collect location data, with the small indicator that looks like a diagonal upward arrow displayed in the status bar.

On the other hand, if location services are disabled at system level using the dedicated toggle affecting all services (not individually), location data isn’t collected anymore, according to security journalist Brian Krebs.

The unexpected behavior, which could also exist on other iPhone 11 models according to a recent analysis, was discovered in the latest version of iOS 13 and could potentially represent a privacy bug in the operating system and affecting the latest-generation devices. Krebs says reproducing this behavior on an iPhone 8 wasn’t possible.

Apple: No problem here

Apple, on the other hand, suggests this behavior does not produce any security concern, indicating this is exactly how the iPhone location data toggle was supposed to work in the first place.

“We do not see any actual security implications. It is expected behavior 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,” a company engineer told the cited source.

Since Apple doesn’t provide too many specifics on why the device still collects user location when all services are manually disabled, the guess is that the iPhone comes with other services not mentioned in the list in settings and which continue to ping servers because they aren’t turned off in the first place. The general toggle, on the other hand, disables them as well.

Additionally, Brian Krebs suggests that this might be in some way related to the support for Wi-Fi 6, although for now, there’s no confirmation in this regard.