zlacker

>>gorman+(OP)
"20X more telemetry", in terms of data usage, is a pretty meaningless statistic on its own (unless it's large enough to affect your mobile data cap or something).

For instance, I would consider it a much bigger privacy violation for my phone to transmit my exact location every hour than my current CPU usage every 10 seconds.

>>terafl+U5
Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.

>>kllrno+2c
Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033

They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).

>>threes+pn
Nearby WiFi spots can be easily used to track device location. Here is a neat little project that does exactly that for IOT tracking [1].

[1] https://github.com/dmsl/anyplace

>>Partia+SI
Nearby wifi hotspot location is the base for aGPS. Without it it would be slower and eat up more battery.

>>yoz-y+aj1
No... aGPS doesn't use wifi at all. aGPS uses specific services built-in to the cellular network to accelerate your initial fix.

You're right aGPS does speed up your initial time to fix so the GPS receiver doesn't have to be on as long to get an ephemeral location but other than that it doesn't have any impact on battery life such as when you're looking at Google maps with a constant fix.

>>TrueDu+Cg2
My bad, I have been conflating aGPS and WPS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system Still, phones do use hotspot location databases for positioning.