It's almost as though using a phone whose operating system is created and maintained by an advertising company isn't the best idea if you want to keep things like your location private.

iBeacons, which push ads on you when you enter a store, were invented by Apple tho. Do we really need these OS tribalism posts in every topic?

For what it's worth, all operators have a legal obligation to gather these data (at least in the U.S. and Canada) officially for emergency services purposes.

"Emergency services"

Those emergency services are very convenient when it comes to flood warnings, tornado warnings, and even amber alerts. I am personally very glad to have them.

What? Shudders...

Apple is also an advertising company - they have unique IDs with your personal information pinned to them, and they sell ads based on your location, too.

You can change your advertising ID any time you want -- and almost none of their revenue comes from ad sales. In 2016, $190B of their $215B in sales was definitively not from ad sales, and the $25B services category that would include ad sales also includes the percentage of sales from the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple Care, iCloud.. etc. Ad sales are immaterial to their business model.

Immaterial would be a wrong word. Negligible might be better. Negligible right now would be perfect. Let's not be naive, they have a full advertisement department trying to monetize their platform and increase the revenue. They also tried to compete with Google for six years for the same, but failed in the in-app advertising. They are still trying to expand their advertising in other areas though:

http://searchengineland.com/apple-expanding-successful-searc...

Apple makes revenue from ad sales - Apple is therefore also an advertising company.

They're the lesser of two evils. Still an evil, though.

> Apple makes revenue from ad sales

Is that even true? They pulled the plug on mobile ad sales a year or two ago (http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/18/after-abandoning-i...), where else would they make advertising revenue?

And in any case, a company who makes 99.9% of their revenue off of non-ad sales is definitely would never be categorized as an advertising company. My grocery store is paid to put crest at eye-level, that doesn't make them an advertising company...

The iTunes store shows ads, and they can be demographically and geographically targeted.

I don't know if they're ads or not but there's also location based app suggestions too.

disclaimer: i'm a googler so glass house throwing stones etc, and of course the scale is way different

You're right, I wouldn't say your grocery store is an advertising company because they put Crest at eye level - I'd say they're an advertising company because they likely sell your loyalty card data to 3rd parties for $$$. Adtech is eating everyone's data.

IDFA is still going strong on Apple phones and is likely to continue into iOS 11.

Applene never sold ads based on granular locations. Only the same location information that you'd get from an IP address.

There's already much finer granularity in stores, thanks to wifi-based tracking (even if you don't join the network [1]), so this ship has sailed.

Refining GPS accuracy only modestly improves the ability to track what stores you are near. Wifi-assisted GPS tracking that exists today probably tells advertisers everything they need to know already.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper...

The toggle for that notification is in the Maps app under Hamburger > Settings > Notifications > Your Contributions. (If you think that's buried, you should see the developer menu.)

The difference between 5m accuracy and 30cm accuracy isn't terribly important if you're just trying to tell what building someone is in, and it won't improve in-building accuracy. I can't think of anything sketchy that it enables that someone couldn't do already.

All the more reason for people to switch from Android to Apple ecosystem.

Apple has location-based ad targeting on by default, too.

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT205223