You may have recently read something about your iPhone or iPad tracking and storing information about your location, wherein that data would be saved—unencrypted—on any machine you’ve used to connect. It’s true, and after syncing my phone to my work machine machine, and using iPhoneTracker, I can see everywhere I have been in the past year: my trip to Cape Cod (1 month ago), Connecticut (11 months ago), Boston (3 months ago), and many others show up with perfect clarity.
I would show a screenshot of this, but after having my identity stolen, I prefer to have my personal information kept personal. Odds are you do, too.
As a test, I deleted my backups (not recommended), and encrypted my iPhone backup. This made my location information a little more private, and stopped iPhoneTracker from seeing my location. To encrypt your iPhone backup, plug your iPhone in to your computer, open iTunes, and select your iPhone under Devices in the left pane of iTunes. In the right pane, there are some check boxes at the bottom of the page, the very last check box is “Encrypt iPhone backup”; check this box, and enter a password. Your iPhone backups will become encrypted, and your location data will be much less accessible.
I do not know what this information is used for, but most likely it’s for advertising purposes; it is seriously doubtful Apple is using this information maliciously. That said, this information is clearly visible without having an encrypted iPhone backup, and other applications or malware could easily view and exploit this data.
For now, I suggest encrypting your iPhone backup and not backing up to anyone’s machine that you do not trust to ensure your location data does not fall into the wrong hands.