Your iPhone might soon stop telling your wireless carrier exactly where you're standing, and law enforcement won't like it. Apple this week began rolling out a privacy feature that lets users blur their location data before it reaches cellular networks, limiting what carriers can see to just your general neighborhood instead of your precise street address. The move comes as phone companies face mounting scrutiny over how location data gets shared with authorities and targeted by hackers.
A coalition of reporters obtained the dataset, offered as a free sample from a data broker, containing 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people around Belgium. Much of the location data is uploaded by ordinary apps installed on a person's phones, which is sold to data brokers. Those data brokers then sell that data to governments and militaries.
