Your iPhone contains a creepy list of every single ‘significant’ place you’ve visited

If you own an iPhone, you may be concerned to hear that it contains a list of every place you’ve visited whilst carrying it. Buried deep within the iPhone settings is a feature called ‘significant locations’ which contains a chilling rundown of your movements. It’s reasonably hard to find, meaning you won’t come across it by accident, and pretty creepy if we’re being honest. ‘Your iPhone will keep track of places you have recently been, as well as how often and when you visited them, in order to learn places that are significant to you,’ Apple wrote. ‘This data is encrypted and stored only on your device and will not be shared without your consent. ‘It is used to provide you with personalized services, such as predictive traffic routing, and to build better Photos Memories.’ You might end up quite spooked out about all the information a smartphone gathers your movements (Photo: Getty) To find the list, just follow these steps. 

Open up Settings (an app with an icon which looks like a little cog).

Click on ‘Privacy’. 

Open up ‘Location Services’. 

Scroll right down to the bottom of the menu and press ‘system services’. 

You’ll then be able to click on ‘significant locations’ and see everywhere you’ve visited.

The list is hidden deep within the iPhone settings app Here’s how Apple explains its location services, which track the whereabouts of your phone. ‘Location services uses GPS and Bluetooth (where those are available) along with crowd-sourced wi-fi hotspot and cell tower locations to determine your device’s approximate location. ‘Your Apple Watch may use the location of your paired iPhone if it is nearby. ‘If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby wi-fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of wi-fi hotspot and cell tower locations.’ The information Apple gathers about its users is encrypted and anonymised, which means it does not actually build up a dossier which links the information directly to a person’s identity. You can turn off Location Services if you’re concerned. The predecessor of the Significant Locations feature was called Frequent Locations. 

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