As another poster said, it will analyse your locations and predict your 'home to work' time, or between offices, so you can account for travel time (see OSX Mavericks calendar improvements).

I'm sure they will also use it some other ways too, but the gist is that it actually benefits end-user features and isn't just for dragnet data collection.

Four years ago I led a project like this. In this slideset you can see on page 4 what we wanted to build and on page 5 whate we would need: http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/slides/vodafone-pye.pdf

This is a super-interesting project, but not something I would be interested in using.

If I arrive at Piccadilly Circus, I don't want my phone to tell me what service I [should need/should be using] - I want to easily and consistently access any service that I want from my phone.

I want to be in control of my phone, not for my phone to be in control of me.

Even then people were overwhelmed by the phone functions and could not navigate the directory when they needed something quick. With people having installed tens of apps nowadays, this problem is even worse...

I feel that the correct solution to this is approximately the one that now exists: allowing people to control how the navigation screens look, and control for themselves how to access the apps they use.

transparency for privacy (+1 for apple)

Would you rather not having this feature? It is better to have th ability to clear this data from your phone, which is currently provided in iOS 7 beta 5.

It's not an Amazing find at all, given that apple has built a relatively sophisticated UI for it.

It's public facing precisely because people are concerned about this kind of data collection. This way you can make an informed choice about what apps can see about you and what to send to apple.