Every cellphone ever could be tracked via the cell handoffs and triangulating. The police could always get at this, thats not the issue at hand.

What people are complaining about is the consolidated.db file which appears to be a cache of general locations of where wifi SSID's are located. It also keeps a log of where the phone was in general when a call was placed. This is on the phone and is just an sqlite3 db, pick it open and have a look.

Now why, from an engineering perspective, is this necessary? Answer, it isn't, at least not entirely. LocationServices is the likely answer. There are api calls you can make that amount to "Give me the general location of the phone accurate to Xmetres." that don't invoke the gps unless needed to save battery life. Say you're hooked up to your wifi at home and the phone has cached this ssid/wifi point do you really need the gps to give you a location accurate to 1000 metres if the app just wants to know the state you're in? No, so you cache some of this information in this little db and give a general "around here is where i'm at" reply when the app just wants a general idea of location. So with this in mind, would Jobs be wrong in stating that they don't track you? No he would be 100% accurate as a cache used to help save battery life isn't tracking you, its a cache.

Now as to the backups containing the file, thats rather obvious as they are backups and exposes the need for an individual to encrypt the backups. You should be doing this already. Anyone here that doesn't encrypt their phone's backups, be it android or ios, shouldn't be calling themselves a hacker. Its a known source of private data, if you aren't encrypting it, you are accepting risk if someone gets a hold of it. Just make sure your family members also do this, you're likely the geek of the family, help them with a bit of good information.

What worries people is if the consolidated.db gets sent or uploaded in some fashion. The data isn't all that useful for tracking you since the location data for SSID's are general and don't appear to update each time you see them, and the call data only seems to use cell triangulation and only when the call was placed. Could you use this to track someone? Sure but no more than you could by tailing them in a car or following them.

The comments for this post are a bit appalling for what I've come to expect from this site. There is way too much hyperbole and vitriol in most of these comments. I'm not trying to advocate for Apple, more to set people straight on actual facts as we currently know them. Those with developer accounts should look at the 2010 WWDC video 150 iirc (at work so can't verify, was that or 151), should shed some light on things. I'd rather we have an actual discussion over the amount of data we store on these handheld devices and the "security" and lack thereof around them. To me there is a lot more that can be done in general, be it android or ios or whatever to secure things. Lashing out at one vendor here isn't helpful, we need the whole industry to recognize the issues. For starters I would like some very fine grained controls ala selinux to control what apps get access to what. Down to the contact level if need be. Things along those lines, not a general this app can get access to your whole address book etc...